On a hill above my city
sits a small blue house;
through my years of winter,
I’d walk past now & then,
oblivious to what could be found within.
Friends and strangers
would find me shivering on park benches;
some would weep for me; others
walked by, oblivious
to what could be found within me;
I was just a character in a scene,
a daily urban play
held in a globe of snow.
One friend spoke to me
and pointed to the blue house, saying
“Within, a clear cool spring,
leads to a river flowing
home.”
Home was a foreign place to me, but still,
I walked to the blue house,
and opened the door, hand in hand
with the ghost
of three years of winter.
There, I met
the brunette and tiny
would-be
manager of my life;
we fenced and sparred throughout our morning hours,
she pleading, “please come
home.”
Yet I couldn’t let go of winter,
held in flat clear vodka bottles;
in the evenings of those mornings,
I’d sip my life away
to the song of frigid breezes.
A day came
when I stopped
struggling against the current
of that river
flowing home;
my foe became a partner
as we built a bridge for home
with paper and patience,
and hope came in weekly envelopes,
all addressed to me.
Today,
I sit among my own four walls
and gaze out my window at autumn trees
whose colors no longer signal
months of chills.
the river flowing home
reaches the sea on this day,
its source, one mile north
in the warm room of a blue house.
When I go there now, I see
ghosts of my three-year winter
sipping coffee, munching sandwiches, and I hope
each one finds the river
flowing homeward.
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