April 15th

In media res

So, there I was in this dark wood, thinking
I'd been there so long, my youth felt like someone's
dream of quickly moving cloud shadow across
a green, green landscape, as viewed through a snow
globe.  I remember learning the phrase "personal
mythology," loving the audacity and poetry of
that.  A personal myth can become a dark wood.
Still, moments lay track in the mind, the dream
of Professor Schultz ferrying me down a misty
river, wearing her '80s glasses, pointing out
ruins along the shore, my inheritance.  Or the time
I asked my brother what those flowers were called
again.  "Azaleas," he said.  "But they've all been
bought by Oprah and now we have to call them
Ozaleas."  Was it worth it?  The long reaching
line of ancestors' struggle, forbearance, violence,
colonization, births, disease, all that mess,
just so Zander could stand in the yard and tell
me about Ozaleas?  It's just what happened,
I suppose.  Belly of the whale.  All I have is this
rickety ladder reaching, reaching built of
tenderness, built of my fierce loyalty to odd
moments.  And here I sit, ghosts and birds calling
to me behind a sheer curtain on a beautiful day,
outside the Ozaleas throwing out their arms.