Keeping Time
Some days you wonder if you’ve lost it
the wrinkled map that shows you how
to put one foot in front of the other
days spent hacking back the blackberry jungle
looking for something you can’t define
amid the siftings of crumbling canes
the half dead mulch of last years
brome that hides one jewel like cocoon
you nest back beneath cedars
just last week you told your psychiatrist
you just needed more patience more time
to work out what you’d lost
her soothing voice swirling in the whorls
of the big pink conch as she tells you
how it might be you had to have lost something
in order to find it (again)
so now you struggle into your pack
heading west by counting redbuds
gain the scrub of wild plum humming
with its many bees and kneel to cup
first blue phlox by the bend in the creek
slowly you come upon these moments of findings–
new lambs, new calves, a wobbly foal
a neighbors new baby—and somehow
the hole in the bottom of the well
that is your heart begins to fill
water trickling in cold, clear and
you shove the map into your pack
and step out keeping time
to the melodies of first frogs.
Pat Anthony writes the backroads, celebrating Nature in all its wonder and with all its healing properties as she strives to live well with bipolar disorder. Between Two Cities on a Greyhound Bus and Middlecreek: Currents and Undercurrents are out as chapbooks and she has work published or forthcoming in other journals.
