* * *

Still not moving a muscle,

her musings take a different turn.

Her thens and nows merge

into what thens? what ifs? whys?

She digs into chambers of stillness

yet untainted by too many wrong questions

and finds enough echo of

the questions once most prevalent:

why not? How?

* * *

Timelines soon give way

to time’s lines wending their way

through the groves of memory,

the pastures of her being

where placid, daytime scenes

of yesterday’s yearnings

force their way upward

and sit on the floor of her conscious heart.

* * *

Is the ideal and the real

a good place to struggle?

“How long?” she thinks, must this

place elude where

boundaries crave margins,

periods demand commas

on statements crying out to be questions?

“Isn’t this story old enough?

When do I get to narrate what

seems so uncontrollable, characters

unrecognizable, a plot unyielding?

* * *

“Birds don’t sing because

they have an answer,

but because they have a song” they say.

Who is “they” and what do

“they” say when the “song”,

already oversung, becomes a mockery

in its lack of answers?

Sometimes the ready breath

of silence with neither song nor answer

brings more life than

a song that is merely a

kitchen without windows.

Painting: At the Kitchen Window by American painter De Scott Evans (1847-1898)