Heat Wave

The sun comes over the quarry,
abnormally hot for a land known
more for snow than the heat waves,

famous for icy poets,
the summer playground
of the rich and forgotten of another age.

You sit on the porch,
your journal on your lap,
small drops of sweat, fallen from your brow

hit the pages, splashing the blue ink
like modern art over your words.
You came to these mountains, searching for love

and the possibility of love,
for a new fire to inflame you,
not realizing that love has no geography,

no schedule and a logic all it’s own,
neither mind, nor heart,
but a blend of both, fueled

with a heady mix, an uneven
and ever changing recipe of
memory, madness, hope and imagination.

Ever new.
ever eternal,
a heat wave of the heart.

About this poem

This poem really IS a stew of influences.

First, there is my quote of the week this week, which comes from Charles Dickens – “Some persons hold that there is a wisdom of the mind and that there is a wisdom of the Heart.”

Then there’s the fact that we really ARE having a heat wave here in Vermont. It’s 95 right now, and you have no idea how rare that is up here.

And Robert Frost (the icy poet in the poem) lived up here in Vermont, not far, actually, from my home.

And love?  I moved to Vermont from Southwest Virginia four years ago, some time after a painful divorce, to be close to the woman I love, to discover if our love had the stuff to last. It’s been an amazing journey.

Tom

PS – the picture is of the quarry just across from my house.