Apatite

~For Ward

Some stones clear your head

so you can feel their colors.

It takes attention to detail.

The way I look for poetry in The Times

and always find it, though

there are no poems in its pages.

A word here, a title there.

The Times is chock full of sparks

when the mind’s as

dry as parched kindling.

With my garden I uphold

the pursuit of beauty

even as the flowers

make me feel a Frankenstein.

My over-grown hands

and scarred face

fumbling amongst the petals;

things so effortlessly perfect

just as they are,

while I’m stitched together

limb by limb,

my transplanted heart

squeezed inside 

its treasure chest-like terrarium,

along with precious scraps

from learned books

stuffed and corked

for safe keeping.

How I long to put my feet

back into earth.

I am in awe of colors

for their own sake,

they create a climate

cogent as inner weather.

That's how I know

the wind

is the will power

of the world,

that life is alive without us

and to participate

its best to put down

our belongings

and just join in.

I recently received an apatite

stone as a present.

A beacon for drawing down the stars.

Almost immediately something was different,

as if its properties were loosening me.

What was once packed,

constipated, congested, stuffed,

filled to the brim…

now flows.

I used to run around like a chicken

with its head cut off

to live more from the heart.

Now I sit still.

This mineral has me thinking

of all I’ve done to myself

to try and stay alive.

You’d think

failure were an art,

and every step I took

a kind of canny forgery.

Like forgetting to water the flowers

or refusing to eat what’s before me.

The way I ran away from the moment,

one would have thought it

full of hurt.

Wanting to look like someone else.

Wanting to touch someone else’s body.

Not staying silent when

I'd nothing to say.

How I survived being trapped

by gnawing off a vital extremity.

My discomfort with being naked.

My disgust for other’s selfishness,

(having been selfish most my life).

My impatience with those who are ill.

My refusal to remember my mother.

The abandonment of my own protagonism.

The way the past makes me cry.

The way loss humbles me to the core.

The way I crawl into films

to deposit my feelings for safe keeping

knowing one day I will return for them

hoping to feel them again

in the safety of

a rainy afternoon.

By Peter Valentyne

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