Closings
for a friend on her way
Back to my cardboard boxes, she ended her email
—my friend, packing up thirty years of her life
before setting off for the new and unknown.
Back to my boxes, I read, and the sour dry smell
of cardboard flooded my senses, recalling
the boxes that have closed many chapters for me.
The smell lingers in empty rooms, and I still hear,
long after it’s gone, the enormous van’s rumble
along that old street, carrying away my life’s clutter,
I care not where, and I sit on the floor with what’s left:
pale marks on the carpet, dustballs, a suitcase or two.
In that moment of sudden stillness, in rooms filled
with the lingering odor of cardboard and the absence
of things, I expand into empty spaces, grow large
with the promise of possible, the new and unknown.
A Writing Life
It might come
from breathing in chill morning air.
hearing bird calls in the pines,
and, if the day is clear,
looking through green forest
to blue sea, letting the eye pause
over white caps before it travels
all the way to the horizon,
the edge of the world,
my world anyway.
Or,
I might go in and forget about all that,
move on to coffee, warm toast, the papers,
—a local speaks out on the latest controversy
—a shooter’s gone berserk somewhere
—a music reviewer opines in the New York Times.
I bury myself in newsprint and coffee,
allow life’s gallimaufry
to float through me, around me.
Will I write about any of it today?
Not necessarily.
Yet without knowing
how I got there
I’m at the computer
—an image
maybe from childhood
or something a friend said
last week or long ago
or what I saw or heard
that morning
returns
and with it an urgency
to hold on to it, to fathom
what it meant or means or could mean
—reaching into myself
for shapes sounds shadows
watching words arise
from the keyboard,
flow onto my screen,
until I sense stirrings of life
in a poem.
On a good day.
Marina Romani, now retired from a couple of careers and as many marriages, lives in Monterey, California, where taking oceanside walks and writing poems are among her greatest pleasures. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Homestead Review, Porter Gulch Review, Monterey Poetry Review, Tor House Newsletter, and Poetry Pacific. She is currently completing a poem and prose memoir about her unusual childhood, spent in wartime and civil-war China.
for a friend on her way
Back to my cardboard boxes, she ended her email
—my friend, packing up thirty years of her life
before setting off for the new and unknown.
Back to my boxes, I read, and the sour dry smell
of cardboard flooded my senses, recalling
the boxes that have closed many chapters for me.
The smell lingers in empty rooms, and I still hear,
long after it’s gone, the enormous van’s rumble
along that old street, carrying away my life’s clutter,
I care not where, and I sit on the floor with what’s left:
pale marks on the carpet, dustballs, a suitcase or two.
In that moment of sudden stillness, in rooms filled
with the lingering odor of cardboard and the absence
of things, I expand into empty spaces, grow large
with the promise of possible, the new and unknown.
A Writing Life
It might come
from breathing in chill morning air.
hearing bird calls in the pines,
and, if the day is clear,
looking through green forest
to blue sea, letting the eye pause
over white caps before it travels
all the way to the horizon,
the edge of the world,
my world anyway.
Or,
I might go in and forget about all that,
move on to coffee, warm toast, the papers,
—a local speaks out on the latest controversy
—a shooter’s gone berserk somewhere
—a music reviewer opines in the New York Times.
I bury myself in newsprint and coffee,
allow life’s gallimaufry
to float through me, around me.
Will I write about any of it today?
Not necessarily.
Yet without knowing
how I got there
I’m at the computer
—an image
maybe from childhood
or something a friend said
last week or long ago
or what I saw or heard
that morning
returns
and with it an urgency
to hold on to it, to fathom
what it meant or means or could mean
—reaching into myself
for shapes sounds shadows
watching words arise
from the keyboard,
flow onto my screen,
until I sense stirrings of life
in a poem.
On a good day.
Marina Romani, now retired from a couple of careers and as many marriages, lives in Monterey, California, where taking oceanside walks and writing poems are among her greatest pleasures. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Homestead Review, Porter Gulch Review, Monterey Poetry Review, Tor House Newsletter, and Poetry Pacific. She is currently completing a poem and prose memoir about her unusual childhood, spent in wartime and civil-war China.