Rocking

It comforts me to know the old
couple across the street
just celebrated fifty years

in the same house. Fifty together years
with the home they perhaps chose
to be new in together,
a threesome of sorts,
their bodies joining brick
and hardened earth
settling and cracking
and pressing together,

adding more spackle
and grout
and laughter

with a child, then three more,
adding rooms
to contain the growing
and the mirth
and the tears
of those who were
fledged,
now gone.

When my soul grows weary
traversing tightropes—
such fast-paced, overloaded,
know-too-much times—
I look across the street,

to the wise and wizened pair
who are ever so busy
slowly rocking, in their old chairs,
on the porch,

and it consoles me to witness them,
soothes me to consider
the old ways of houses
and their people,
and the history of aged dwellings anywhere,
the ways these wood and stone
talismans seem to lean into
a wind or two that can elicit creaks,
groans even,

and their occupants
maybe know
they are being held up
by sagging floorboards
and crumbling plaster,
and the roof is losing shingles
fast as hairs on their heads,

yet they rock, and nod,
and smile
as if to say

where are you rushing to,
and don’t you know
all things fall apart.
We do, too,

so why not sit awhile,
give the swirling
sediment of your ancestors,
and the greening pollen
that falls from the trees
like stardust in the daytime,
a place to land.

See how the wind marries the light,
begets little particles of evidence
that you’re alive,
that others have been, too,
and ragweed and dander,
detritus of the whole cosmic swirl,

touch down on your arms,
have little dances
before they settle there.

 

–Melinda Coppola

 

 

 

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