THE DOOR INTO DISTANT SPRING

I am laying on my bed, the door is open -

not to the snow gleaming in sunlight

as a breeze with a hint of spring

moves the drapers - no,

the door is open to a moment

buried deep, deep in the past;

some year long gone had it,

this sweet peace I enjoy.

Enjoying the evening sunlight,

the breeze telling of buds to come

on boughs, of grass and flowers

waiting as seeds, the book

in my hands, Dostoyevsky

and the joy, the joy and ease

I feel that come from the distant

past, the long buried past,

through all these decades,

and I am young and hopeful again,

such a long, long ago,

time folding, personality folding,

part of the boy that was

in the man with gray and white

in his beard, and the book

in my hand is one weft, the Brothers Karamazov,

the breeze with its visions of spring

a second, the evening sunlight a second,

my mind the warp and this

undeserved, unexpected joy a miracle

they make. I am ready to cry,

not of pain or sadness, not

because of all the graves

and all the decades and all the

failed hopes and all the mistakes

that led to the graves, no

I am ready to cry out of happiness,

to be myself once more,

not the one that I made with such

trembling hands at life's loom,

but what I was, before,

the raw material made wrong.

The broken barrier will made itself anew,

time will refold and the folded

personalities will separate; past

and what is today outside this magical sphere

will drift away to their time and space.

The lesser me will be back,

a master of all he wrecked,

the pathetic lord of the ruins.

But the boy will be there,

there in his own time,

in this moment of golden gentle sunlight

and breeze with it soft hints of new grass

and the first small blossoms,

of a life-time of books, reading and writing

and growing up to fill

what promise he held.

10.04.2018