A New Poem: “Verging”
Verging
There is a wild red room with sun on its walls
and blue sky smearing its old plank floor.
There is a hallway and three passages.
Creaky stairs climb to the children’s rooms.
In one passage, two figures find sanctuary,
pausing to talk about their shadows,
seen and unseen, cast on the floor below
and cast the years behind. Between them floats
the distance of two hands not reached out.
A foot or fifteen years, they cannot tell any longer.
Time and space become selfsame in loss.
Their heads are downcast with the weight of leaving.
Out of frame slumps a stuffed duffel bag and coat.
The truck idles, rough and smoky, warming up in the driveway.
No garage had always been one of her complaints about the house.
They chose it together but never moved in to each other.
There hadn’t even been time yet to repaint the red walls.
“What you see is what you get,” he had said to her at the beginning.
He flopped his hands on the hips of his work pants and smiled.
She smiled, too, but didn’t say anything. Someone once said,
“If you tell someone, ‘I love you,’ and they say anything
other than, ‘I love you, too,’ then they do not love you.”
That is about the long and short of it,
he thought, standing with her in the doorway.
At least she has a wild red room
with sun on its walls.
And he has a truck that starts and runs
whenever his heart calls.
Verging was written after the painting by Jennifer Tobias as part of the for the Ekphrastic invitational event during the exhibition Between Us held at the Crooked Tree Art Center, Traverse City, in Michigan. The painting is included here with permission of the artist.
