Bathtub Thoughts

There is a radio in your bathroom
and you play it each night as you soak,
your father’s music, big bands and Sinatra,
a pretense perhaps,
an escape to a time that you never know,
perhaps that never existed as you imagine it.

But then, much of your life is not as you see it.
There is so much hidden,
for reasons built on kindness, real and false,
for self protection, yours and theirs,
because of poor historians and good poets,
the details of life seem muddled,
an expressionist watercolor in the rain,

Just enough
to know what it is.
but never with certainty.

You are content with that, to have a sense of things.
It reduces life to simple blocks and steps,
and somehow, that works, perhaps better
than the effort of managing the details:
You are always surprised, never bored,
and life has more beauty than most people are allowed.

About this poem

I got a late start writing today, and my head was already too full, so I skimmed through my pictures, picked this one from a room in Wilson Castle, an old home in Proctor, VT, and wrote a poem to it, I like doing that because I never know what’s going to come of it as I begin.

I really do have a radio in my bathroom. A good one.

Life’s an adventure.

Tom