The Poet’s House

photo credit: Henry Whitehead Place via photopin (license)

The Poet’s House

He sat at the rickety old table
The sound of fingers tapping on wood…
The fire still crackling in the old wooden stove
Attempting to stand on three dilapidated metal legs
With a knotty pine branch for a fourth…

The frayed quill pen lay dormant
Atop the faded parchment…
His mind wandering through
Memories in the fog
While in this moment finding
More interest in the whiskey
He held in his hand…
Then in his poetry…

But, then, he writes more of honesty
While indulged within his intoxication…
Speaking often upon the parchment
Of a love, long since lost to his wanderings…
And his intoxications…
Yet, forever lingering within his mind…
Now filled with only remembrances
Of what once filled his pages…
Which remain at present… empty

His long silver hair,
Slightly curled at the tips
Falling just below his shoulders…
His soiled and worn gaucho,
Its brim bent into contortions,
Resembling so accurately his mind
In this moment…
His right hand alternating between
The un-rhythmic tapping on the table…
To the slow stroking of whitened beard
Now streaming eight… or perhaps nine inches
South of his chin…
His left hand gripping tightly
The bottle of tipple…

Troubled by the voices
That echo in his head,
Of poets long passed before him…
Their whispering…
Attempting to engender his saga in rhyme…
Only serving to perpetuate his confusion…
Distending ever so conterminally to the abyss
Of his discernment…

Most of the folks in these parts
Fully expect him to be found
Sitting in that very chair…
Just as he is in this moment…
Un-breathing his poetry…
His philosophies of love…
And of life…
Eyes fixed upon the parchment before him…
No longer encasing what once was
A kind and amatory soul…

Yet… he gathers another breath…
Looks slowly around the room
At the antiquities still gathering dust
From every intellection of his chronology…
Lingering in the faded moments
When those same antediluvian bagatelles
Were bathed in loving interludes of heaven…

He often casts his gaze upon the brass bed
Lying undisturbed in the loft…
The flax yarn linens remaining in their perfectness
Far beyond his last counting of fortnights…
His idea of a restful sleep
Is to curl up on the quilt that rests on the floor
Alongside the old wood stove…
Snuggled warmly between his dog
And the cat that had mysteriously appeared
The day after his Maggie had left…
Forcing its way into the cabin,
Making herself at home as if
She had always lived there…
While he and the dog treasured the company

As I near the old cabin
Far removed from anything of civilization
I pause to observe the ribbon of smoke
Arising from the stove pipe
Casually drifting in the breeze along the hillside
Gently wending its way into the sky
Of azure and amaranth…
I have brought for him
His most cherished items…
Next to his pen and his parchment…
For I have come with a tin of wooden matches
And candles of bayberry wax…
For his most beautiful words
Ever finding their way
Onto the edge of his tattered
And darkened parchment
Arrive always…
In the stillness of the dark…
In the moments
Just before the dawn…

Michael33

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