On the Wing

Seems like I almost caught a poem that wanted to visit, but it breezed by so quickly, by the time pop has fetched me paper and pen there is but a whiff left.

I try to snatch its tail feathers.

“Please come back, please.  Take up residence, even.
I’ve been waiting.
Okay, I’ve been desperate.”
My tattered grey matter is entangled with scary medical stories leaving room for little else.
Make way for a poem!
Can a poem bring me home?
Oh, reader, how naked dare I make myself before you?
This poem wants to be a water buffalo soaking in mud.
Or some parasite tucked neatly in the wing of a migrating bird,
world far below, the secret cargo of an animal following a deep instinct
I hope science never comes to fully understand.
Or hear this: It baldly wants to be in its mother’s womb.
And if it had to be born, it wanted to be a token of comfort to a particular loved one in pain. 
It broke down when it could not.
I don’t know much about this poetry biz. 
I guess you don’t get to choose how they are born any more than any other creature does. 
But recently it has seen some really bad poems, and doesn’t want to take up residence amongst them.
Though desperate, it is still snooty that way.
It slides backwards, clinging to the past;
it can’t understand you who have moved on and are loving someone other than me now.  Love Me.
The beauty of the world taunts me, irritates me, even as it breathes me.
So, if you can, I demand that whoever you are, you enjoy it where I cannot,
and at the same time that you allow me a moment of resentment that you can.
And if you cannot enjoy the beauty of the world, I kiss your feet. 
That too is one of the lives of the heart.

This poem has gotten blunt blurry.

It happens like that, comes into focus only occasionally on the page,
surprising me for a moment in my fuzzy world.

This is not the poem I wanted to catch on the fly, but it is the one that landed.
Its taste is sour. 
Sometimes even medicine is like that.

--Molly Hunt  November 2013

Fuzzy World

Hard to decipher through miasm of brain and wonky vision.

I used to like the world gone indistinct:
Driving on a dark foggy night, trying to decide on high or low beams;
skiing through mists, having to rely on the feel of the snow under my blurry skis;
or gazing dreamily out a rain-drop blurry city window.
The world of vague forms emerging under painfully opened under-water eyes.
How about this.  Hiking at night: be careful, but be bold too.
And what about blind-folded party games—did everyone else cheat as much as I?

These days things go blurry with tears over silly things: the sight of Papa’s beloved sweaters—ones long coveted and snuggled in or up against—now suddenly appearing moth-eaten and abandoned in the pile of trash.

World swims around me while I try to navigate; even while lying still in bed.
I don’t like my new blurriness.  It’s not transporting and exciting like the old kind.

Give me back the old kind of indistinct me: the one you see in those quasi-mirrors in smelly outhouses on government-land campsites with unpotable water.