A Frozen Tableau
In What Do We Place Our Trust?
A Frozen Tableau
Snowy white backdrop
with trees and other
landmarks
like cars, and houses,
and people walking by
sticking darkly out
like brush strokes on
a painting.
Like a frozen tableau
which will be gone
with the sun, the
brush strokes remaining
and the backdrop strangely
gone.
Sometimes the things which
seem the most permanent,
are the most transitory,
and the most provisional,
well, the most durable.
Hard to guess which is which
until your backdrop has melted away.
...and then it's hard to trust what's left.
For fear those brush strokes will fade
away
as well.
In what do we place our trust?
What cannot be taken/stolen/
plundered from our cabinet, our
secret hiding places deep inside
that we don't allow anyone else
to see,
our treasure, our
little dreams
about the world
we thought
mom and dad
gave to us?
Once that treasure trove
our little dream of what life
was supposed to be like
is plundered,
what is left
for us to build a life around?
Because sometimes that's the real question,
isn't it?
Underneath snowfall scenery and
rivulets of the melted lie the immutable.
That which doesn't change if nature
is left to its own devices.
The unassailable
cycle of regeneration and growth,
the ecology of the human psyche,
the need for love and human touch,
the need to love, and to touch,
the need to learn, always learn
and explore, the inborn unconditionality
of motherlove to child and childlove to
motherdear, the sacredness
of each human.
Hands broken from pummeling frozen
backdrops which melted away
leaving only water to pound against
nothing solid, only ephemerality
to punch against, no satisfying
crunch of hand against something
which hurts, because it all hurts
more because of the powerlessness
of hitting nothing which hits back. And so punching
oneself into bloody unconsciousness
takes the place of lashing the world.
Snow comin' down now, like the sweet
rain which washes the dirt away, the
regeneration begins, and then freezes,
pretending to be reality, an end-product
for awhile, when it's only
a part of the cycle.
I have put my heart upon the frozen
backdrop and had to rip it away,
I have felt the cleansing wash of tender
flakes of cold against my cheek take the
pain away.
I sit still watching snowy backdrops
or melted streams of icy water, or sunlit
days with rain chasing after. I am me,
despite all, and the cycle of life I face
changes not, though
the frozen backdrop tableau
seems awfully cold this year.
In a little while it will melt and
the cycle of composition
begin again.
If I'll let it.
