Leaving
I clean closets and bookshelves and donate
the once essential, now superfluous
to local charities, uncurious
as to the largess I suddenly make
of bits and pieces torn from a life lived
momentarily in the glare of their
small town, a non-local who sometimes shared
moments of casual togetherness, enough to give
food for talk. My apartment slips from me
and seems a stranger. It stares blankly back,
my once-home fading, falling into cracks
of impersonality.
Morning rises under a tepid sun
warming bare rooms waiting no one.
Alice I am
I fall and wake in night lands,
in worlds known to my dreaming self
puzzled together by invisible hands.
A flurry of bees, a swarm of me’s
pollinate my orderly borders
my well-clipped lawns, a buzz
that drones the day, a hidden hum
as night comes. With a flurry-scurry
pieces drift and shift and fall
and float and settle in place,
and I, like Alice, wander my Wonderland
of self.
Transplanted
I walk new lands now,
cities of perpendicular greatness
butting heads against blues
that crack and break and fall,
slivers of light that cut
shadows dimming streets below.
I wander in and out of darkness.
I searching that continent of sky
that used to house me, its roof that stretched
from dawn to dusk.
Dreams soared naturally then, up to its infinite dome
as I drowsed beneath on summer grasses,
a dreamer who now understands
that Eden surrounded me, unknowingly at hand.
Janet Butler relocated to the Bay Area after many years in central Italy. She now lives in Victorian Alameda with Fulmi, a lovely Spaniel mix she rescued in Italy and brought back with her. She teaches ESL in San Francisco, and participates in poetry readings and watercolor workshops locally.
Some recent publications are The Chaffey Review, the 13th Warrior, Plainsongs, Locust, and Halfway down the stairs. Future publications include Clarion, Pirene’s Fountain and Red Fez. A chapbook, “To see you no more”, was released by Punkin House Press this September; “Under Italian Skies” was published by Flutter Press in April of this year.
