Figuring Out Life While Aging
I dream of silence,
stillness,
like midnight after snowfall
underground in winter
after summer’s shiftings.
What is the story’s
meaning
after the return,
gripping the chalice
we all must drink from?
Choose the ending
hoped for,
and dance towards,
(with new steps)
the never ending music.
In a dream I cross
the path to my past.
The windows of our home
warm with welcoming golden light.
I enter the unlocked door
and open my mouth to call your name -
and remember -
I don’t live there
anymore.
Cross-posted – https://joanvinallcox.substack.com/p/golden-light
My left eye weeps while
my right stares stubbornly out
at the world’s beauties
and horrors.
What, in this time
and place,
can I do
but acknowledge both?
I watch birds over a lake,
and listen to traffic noise;
beyond thought,
I await what is to be.
Cross-posted – https://joanvinallcox.substack.com/p/my-left-eye-weeps
Like the flame on a burnt out candle
you flicker,
ghosting through me.
A photo triggers new puzzles,
whispering to me
of what I hadn’t searched for.
Lost memories haunt my hopes,
but my hands remember
the truth of your sight.
Cross-posted – https://joanvinallcox.substack.com/p/ghosting
My noisy mind
grafts
my longed for
or my feared
events into
stories I’m revisiting.
The frontispiece
says 1992,
from my dead parents
with wishes
for my purple
old age.
Now I read
stories I fear
and remember
setting the book aside,
pleased I kept it;
knowing it’s prophetic.
For KJEC
Sometimes
when I don’t hear your step
and remember how
you disliked heights,
I look out
from my airie
and search.
Often
when I touch your books
and remember how much
you fed my mind and heart,
I hug myself
alone in my airie
and smile.
Always
when I think of you
and remember how
you listened
smiling and seriously,
cradling my self
my airie expands
with all our gifts.
Cross-posted - https://joanvinallcox.substack.com/p/my-poems
My poems are my life
spoken from my dancing fingers,
held cupped in digital space
while my being swirls through time.
Dodging alignments wastes
gifts,
slows coalescences
induces boredoms.
Learning the steps
of my dance
moves my deaf heart
into the vital whirl.
Yet pain or fear-shaped pauses
can refine
the texture of the path,
opening to unknown vistas.
The sky is never
still,
constant in unnoticeable
changes,
hidden till time passes
Like who I love
and how
this moment holds
their presence
and releases us into changing.
I would have wept at the sunrise
had I not smelled rain coming;
there is only joy with the bird’s flight
over the lake’s unfathomable depth.
When the heart offers to open
and the mind does not jail it,
the moment and the path coincide
into the blind seer’s holy gift.
I would not refuse it.
I could not refuse its shaping power;
even through the tangled fears,
sunlight warms and draws me.
Learning Living 