Kissing Keyholes

The problem is imagination – perfect for art or innovation or whimsy or building a robot. Imagination constructs glimmering bridges of possibility and what-if and maybe. It is a pulse that has the power to ignite some way forward.

But it is also a cancer creeping undetected at the margins. How many hours spent tending a granite garden? How many picnics by the river fail to fold up neatly in one's backpack after the long, slow, first kiss under falling leaves or shooting stars or firefly discos?

Keeping just enough wine in the bottle to get to sleep. How imagination eats at the seams. How it hovers at the door, kissing keyholes. How it skips across the stillness in the lake.

We who listen to every thing will not hear the wind in the leaves much longer. At this latitude, in the tenth month, the mandatory acquiescence of a darker, colder dawn constricts every morning. Violet light creeps through branches in various stages of undress. Soon, only sky in its granite palette. Gradient gunmetal pushed upward by woodsmoke and deep sighs.

This family has built each member, each universe, into one another so that there is no peeling bark or extrication of a whole. What or who one touches, touches all. What one does, is done unto all. There is no otherwise. Yet, in the imaginings, there is no community – only selfish satisfaction of one moment existing as a bountiful island in a happy sea. Both truths refuse to be set down, like a pure white pelt carried further and further into January.