My harvest song

I started writing this at my kitchen table with a spoon in my hand. At a time I should have been attacking lists and homework, I felt the unflagging and urgent need to figure out all of life's problems. Or rather, all of my own, which are, truth be told, blessedly few.

My mind was oscillating between the fury of T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,

(Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions)

which is an old favorite and makes me readily imagine Eliot as a fine friend of Andrew Bird's, and the sometimes trite words of J.R.R. Tolkien (Not all those who wander are lost) and a dozen other half-formed thoughts, while my suitcase heart was ruminating in the forthcoming joys and gratitude of the Thanksgiving season, which is my favorite holiday. One submission deadline later, this emerged. A not-so and yet so-very Thanksgiving poem:

North

the distant howling of a train and

faint rumbling lull me to sleep each night,

the sound like an a old pipe or hesitant faucet,

that comes, instead, from my bedroom window

on which i've drawn a map of the world

superimposed over my view of the neighbor's 

closeted patches of grass

or of the stars, depending on the angle.

with my dry erase marker i start to draw cities

and arrows that spread over years,

and charts to calculate weight;

i was never one to travel light, least of all now.

in my youth i would lean my head 

against the cool of the window 

in the backseat of the station wagon 

as we drove south for the winter,

for pies and pine trees 

and piles of people asleep on the floor.

i should have more memories; 

should remember smells, voices, faces.

but i only remember the cold of that window 

that rendered me mute with contentement,

arms clasped around my knees, hands

almost twitching, wanting to throw my arms back 

and grab this whole world and hold it tight,

that warmth in my throat:

the joy of inbetween,

of north to south and south to north.

my bedroom window is cool beneath my fingertips.

the cities aren't looking right.

or maybe the calculations. 

so with a paper towel i clumsily lift the layer of almost-ink

to start again. 

what if?

a story,

no calcultions.

happiness,

not where i want to find it.

the truth,

unslanted.

the distant howling of a train and

faint rumbling pull me from sleep each morning,

the sound like an a old pipe or hesitant faucet,

that comes, instead, from my bedroom window

on which i've drawn a map of the world i've learned by heart:

a muteness impossible to transcribe except for

pies and pine trees and piles of people,

asleep on the floor,

in the nooks of armchairs, holding books,

crowded around the card table, 

who leave 

a place by the window for me,

my bags, and a few more.