A New Boy Again

And so it is that I stop after a week on the road,
sitting in the last diner standing, fresh snow on the ground outside.
It has been a week of contrasts. Twelve hours on the road
going. Ten coming back.
Zen time. Passionate imagination and oriental music.
A wreck or two to pause the time.
Mostly my mind lives languidly as miles go by, thinking of the things
and people I love the most. Next to hours on the ocean,
it is the most perfect of times.

My imagination is not perfect. I prefer it to be less than perfect,
more like the world I live in. That allows it to be more real, at times
more real as the one my body lives in. My imagination is not perfect
but there are parts here and there that are what I am not,
that live where I do not and for those few hours I am content. Even joyful.
Almost seeing.

I drive. And then, at what is supposedly the destination, days pass/
I talk. I listen. There is no quiet there. People I love and who love me
have not seen me for many months, and so we talk. We laugh.
A lot happens over months of time, and no matter
how talkative we are on phones and screens, vast swaths
get left out, most especially the things that lie behind the eyes,
the way the body sits as the mouths talk. There is light there,
or furtiveness, or joy, or lostness that electrons do not transmit.
Energy.

I do not write on these journeys. I am lost in imagination
or lost in catch up conversation. There is not time to reflect
and allow my emotions to catch up with my life. And so it is
that I am sitting again at the last diner standing, gazing inward
and letting my fingers relearn the words, probing in the parts
of my head put on hold while I travel. A new boy again,
finding my way.

About this poem

For some odd reason, I can never write poetry when I go “home” to Virginia, where I spent my first 54 years and where most of my family lives. And it takes a bit of time to shake off the rust and get back to it. I have never understood the whys, but it has been true most of my life.

I love driving. It is as zen for me as sitting by the ocean. So a long trip is as much part of my travels as the destination.

I daydream a lot.

The picture was taken at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT>

Tom