Still the Suffering of our Words

The burden is learned
The way fire at the fringe of a smoldering leaf in autumn is learned.
That is enough, in this our best of worlds.

I feel I have been carrying the message of autumn for eternity,
On my shoulders, never feeling it.
Because of never having known anything else,
I became embroiled with the message.
I wanted to write it for you so you could fathom
The sweet fortune that anticipates us.

We sigh,
Realizing no one makes mistakes.
I penetrate my heart's breath and turn to you.
The feeling is a gem, hidden deep underground.

Time and the lovelorn do not always go hand and hand.
One moves to the north and disappears,
Then, returning, it is greeted with kisses
And a heaviness in the sky or a new kind of joy
Perhaps bathed in a certain baby-round freshness
Reflecting the surprise of my finding the multilayered you

Looking ever so closely to the words coming from your eyes,
The same words rumbles time and time again and are now
Almost like a worn book, brilliantly written.

Anyway, these feelings I try and write for you and you only.
They are childlike words, a crawling pink-cheeked and wet baby
Making their way into your eyes, the eyes which see each cloud,
Everyday see the clouds, incinerating them in shades of meaning or

Non meaning, your palace of folly, sometimes inhabitable
Or like blossoms of some kind, their beauty only meant for the eye,
Not the touch of a breathing living matter such as my hand...

We gain an awareness at the marrow of our feelings,
Burrowing too deep in our soul, the question of what to do,
Constant question stigmas like a new leaf on a tree,
The coming and the sorrowful goings we experience between us each day
With the image fitting into lace, living within the sighs of the present,
Your arguments to yourself falling into the dirt at your feet,
Thought provoking but washed away with the approaching mist.

And what do we have after this bleaching of emotions,
After the purifying ejaculation from the clouds? That you are a maverick
And none of this will matter because regrets are always washed away?
No, they are white or they are multicolored clouds settling among
The color of your eyes, they are the poem of the moment quivering,
Its hair flaming, its meaning never becoming known,
A poem whose hidden syllables of what went before
Are as indifferent as the small path of dirt your thoughts fall into.

And chance is harvesting the both of us.
The poem, the poet, the one who assembles his visions
Among and within the clouds.
Both of us will have the look reflected back on our faces,
The beginning of an autumn sky pointing to the poem of the moment,
The futurities of all that make us who we are,
And this poem of who we are, the poem of you and the poem of me
Setting softly down beside the real us.

The poem of you.
The poem of me.
The poem is the dirt beneath our feet,
The cloud covering our half regrets,
The satisfaction of the raw wind half swallowing
The liquid of this fugitive autumn evening.

^

Biography

Kathleen Conley was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended nursing school and joined the Navy, spending two tours of duty in Viet Nam. She has worked for close to twenty years as a Mental Health Rehab Specialist and has recently retired due to a serious back injury. Kathleen has won various scholarships for poetry and has been published widely in the United States. Kathleen is also currently working on a book of poetry.