The Fine Line Between Melodrama and Disorientation
Sorrow tells me I will not find myself,
recover the place within me that knew
the ease of things,
the trill of birds calling one to another,
exploding hope and promise,
while my knee aches
from overuse, I think,
and I hear the broken wall clock’s
minute-hand swing down to five-thirty
every six minutes while
my phone’s time reads phantom numbers
in the dark, and I wish I
were bike riding with you
in Amsterdam—or in Brugge when
we road outside the city to Damme and back,
through countryside of sweet green and windmills
and a bicyclist hit a woman walking,
or she had a stroke,
and people stopped to help her,
frail and disoriented, move off the path,
and we went as far as the path would let us,
one destination to another,
to accept going nowhere as a place
we no longer refuse to go.