Winter is impetuous. Not because sleeping seems so easy
when rain falls heavy in the morning
but because your thoughts always turn back to wet weary Seattle
with its ash rooftops and the gray Puget Sound lying flat,
thousands of disconnected strangers each writing their own winter story:
a tale of their distance from the world and what’s happening to their body.
♦
To tell the truth, it’s not a problem with their body
but them trying to call their difficulties easy,
attempting to overcome them without first weaving a more worldly story
into their lives. Yet, they still sit and wax chatty about a rainy morning
and gaze out over those familiar wet streets, watching the rain make little flat
circles and the cars wend along the same old alleys of Seattle.
♦
But that, some will say, is the thing about Seattle:
you become affected by the rain, your body
and the daily routine and end up forgetting the earth hasn’t been flat
for at least 700 years and then I stand and say, “traveling is easy,
really, just remember to celebrate the morning
of departure!” But sadly, at this point of the story
♦
the rain falls hard and we drift, while someone else’s story
is being written not just here in the hometown of Seattle
but in also in La Paz and Taipei and so many places where morning
is about more than just breakfast and coffee and things you put on your body.
Those folks understand that traveling is easy,
not like imagining the Andes or the fjords of Norway are flat
♦
features. My friend, don’t ever think that Vasgo Da Gama’s dream was null and flat
or that Odysseus wrote only sunny still waters into his story
or that Marco Polo’s triumphant trek from China was easy,
it’s because these difficulties exist that Seattle
will be transformed into a city in need of leaving. Then everybody
else will respect your scampering off to a different distant morning.
♦
So it goes: time consumes morning,
trains consume tracks, nighttime is broad and flat
and replete with the people who prostrate their body
under immense drops of American rain. Some give their lives another story.
Some aren’t lost inside the dreams and tunnels of Seattle.
Some remember that aviation is easy.
♦
So when the morning of the prodigy’s story
rises like easy rays to warm the winter bodies of Seattle
we see that despite the flats of weather, the thrill of leaving feeds our vision easily.
This is a sestina.
Images by moriza and hermenpaca
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