A little meditation on what Wallace Stegner called “gloomier matters.” But there are always little live things growing. And every story with an end has a beginning and a middle.

Dad says the mums are blooming
as the tulips fade into summer.
Tomato vines work their random course,
they twine and clutch
bearing red fruit and bright worms.

We open the door and go in.
There is a breeze from the open windows
but the day is warm.
What will we be after this?

I want to stand and go, drive east
against the clock, keep low to the land.
Maybe we should weep for a while,
just because. A ritual purge,
a chrismation to make the miles
pass as we climb to high deserts.

Too late. We have the mileage
we have and time catches up
with everyone.

So after this, we are butterflies
between the particles of dust,
there where the light falls
in slanted shafts.

A child reads stories to herself,
lying on the rug.
Outside, an engine strains to rise
and lift away.
And the stories are all about us.

Stories About Us by Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 Unported License.