Figuring Out Life While Aging
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
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
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 at https://joanvinallcox.substack.com/p/liminal-time?r=oj9j7
Liminal Time
Sunshine blurs ghosts,
makes them translucent.
In the dark, they solidify.
Hiding in closets and corners,
they thicken with memories
wisping out from lost letters.
I am waiting
for their approval,
their retreat, their acceptance.
We are all
unreliable witnesses,
sorting and resorting
our memories
crafted from
what we couldn’t see
(then or now,)
as we pin each reshaped story
to our current consciousness.
Who are you? My enemy?
Or another searching soul
lost in your own
wilderness,
your own storms?
2016
Threadbare, faded, ragged from its many unpackings,
each time, deposited in a different storage -
a teal woven curtain, worn meaningless,
hiding
nothing.
The building that contained it - gone.
the people who lived there - far away, most dead.
A memory of a memory of a memory luminous
once,
flaring again, as it crumbles.
An Old Friend’s Gift Reminiscing through the weights of time releases mysteries: diverging paths shadow memories of collective beginnings leading to splintered destinations.
Sometimes the mirror moves showing me what I’d rather not see. Memories shift and reform revealing different stories, painfully clear now. We wear such narrow glasses spotlighting one version, blind to and blurring peripheral possibilities.
Looking for my childhood cottage, rain welcomes us, and my mother's landscape was unrecognizable now. except in some corners of my psyche.
Learning Living 