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Michael Estabrook
Love Speeding Through
What is there to know about love,
or not to know?
It is there,
runs over you like a freight train
leaving you tattered, breathless, confused,
out of place and time,
for as long as it wishes,
wondering, hoping,
but for what? For what?
You are helpless.
It is a storm, a tempest really.
You simply need to weather it
and after it has passed
(if it does pass)
leaving you in disarray
in its wake,
perhaps then you can return again
to as you were before, untouched, unchanged,
but most likely
you will be altered forever,
improved as it were, enlightened perhaps,
as only love can make you,
your skin sizzling with sensitivity,
your mind taut and bright yet introspective,
heightened and wary
for the next train passing through.
Every day of my life
All those years ago, back in college,
her hair so lustrous and long,
her skirts so skimpy and short,
she’s in New York City
with some girl friends,
talking to some boys
outside a theatre,
when one of them says,
barely able to speak in her presence,
staring at her long, shiny brunette hair
flowing down around her shoulders and back,
“I can’t believe
I’m standing here talking to you.”
I’ve known exactly how he felt
every day of my life.
Two or Three Lonely Leaves
cling to their branches, reticent
to release and fall to the ground. Below, leaves
are being blown by cold winds across the lawn
and I’m thinking again about being home with you.
This good evening when the sun is done,
gone down beyond the dome of the Earth,
we’ll be together, just the two of us,
in our family room, watching a movie --
The Razor’s Edge, an old one from 1946,
I am eager to see it again.
I am also looking forward to brushing your hair
or rubbing your pretty feet (whichever you want most)
allowing me to watch the warm smile sweeping peacefully
across your face like waves rippling
across a warm lake during summer.
It is all quite simply more than I deserve,
in this the only life we have.
If there is another life, a next life after this one,
and there is a God of some sort ruling there,
He (or She) will be very happy with me
for having taken such good care of one of his or hers
most precious and perfect creations all these years,
or at least for trying the best I could, like those lonely,
tenacious leaves clinging resolutely to life against
the relentless tug of the winds of time.
©2009 by Michael Estabrook
Over the years Michael Estabrook has published a few chapbooks
and appeared in some terrific poetry magazines, but you are only as good as
your next poem, and like a surfer searching for that perfect wave, he’s a poet
prowling for that next perfect poem. Right now he is looking for that
perfect poem in his wife, who just happens to be the most beautiful
woman he has ever known. If he finds it anywhere, he’ll find it in her.
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