15 Minutes of Faces

The faces.
They haunt you.
They drift, just in the periphery.
No respecters of time,
they come,
unbidden .

Some of them,
the best and the worst of them,
have voices.
The others are silent,
missing pieces
like a child’s puzzle.
Holes
in the fabric of your life.

You wonder sometimes
if they know what they are doing,
or if they are truly dead,
animated by memory.
Or perhaps they are creatures,
anitronons of God or Satan

The older you get,
the more of them there are.
The more your morning drive,
your coffee, the silences in your life
is filled with them.

You miss them. Most of them anyway.
There are empty spaces
you cannot quite fill,
and it is hard work trying;
hard work building relationships,
kinship,
with those that will disappear,
and so you cling to them.
The faces. The voices.
You are
what you have lost.

About this poem

I am of an age where I have lost much. People – wives, lovers, relatives, friends, dear pastors, teachers. Places – my favorite country store. My favorite diner. The store where I always bought my shirts. Jobs – ones I liked and ones that were toxic. I cannot leave my bedroom in the morning without being confronted with their loss. I cannot make the drive to my diner (the fifteen minutes in the title) without passing things that are not there anymore. This place burnt to the ground. This place was abandoned. This place closed. So, a poem about loss and memory.

Also, a lesson in how changing one line changes a poem. Originally, this morning the last line read “until there is bare room for anything else.”. It was dramatic enough, but as I thought on it, as I thought about the truth of my emotions and life, I realized the line was false. No matter the loss, and I have had many, and they run deep, there is always room for new people, friends, mentors, pastors, teachers, and loves. Even when I make things up, I want them to run true, so I removed this line.

My life is rich with people. But the voices still haunt me. Haunting is not a bad word. It speaks to a memory that will not leave, but is not quite, almost but not quite, real.

The photograph was taken in Venice. I did a lot of wandering, and I stumbled into this little studio gallery.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom