IRReVERSIBLE

Leaving the key of the place where I’ve lived and loved with joy and sorrow, played and danced, invested my time, myself, met and mused, many hands shaken, developed essential tremor, walked many steps, seen moons and nights turn as I, yes me, stretched and sagged and boxed and was boxed.  Leaving home.

And melancholia, yes, seeing the untended bushes from a distance, unable to enter, not having entered and looked after them for months; nostalgia in a hot cramped attic in which my worldly affairs wait, in transition;

Catching the bus, not taking the bicycle which gathers cobwebs at the back of the shed, the tyres deflated, no lights or helmet with me, a different view.

Yet the festival of music plays, lifts my spirit; I know this city, many people, I can swim and navigate, go to memorials.

Meanwhile the orchestra tunes up, discordant, babbling,

and then the conductor arrives and everything comes together; yes, yes, I can listen and be moved by beauty, melody, the quick-quick-slow of serendipity, the delicate crystals and simmering of the heart and memories promoting more emotion, each time I enter the flow in the same but different place;

I live, I fly, for the past on which I sit and mount and fall, a bitter-sweet seesaw that encompasses delight and cracks and fronts and backs and doors that close, alas, hurray --

Preparation all, circling down, up, one day I will be gone and leave behind; yet I was here, I loved and lost – I was here, above all, a spark in the universe, bright, fading, I was here.