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Five trivial steps
My listless climb
Exerting just enough to make me wonder
Yet I brush aside my trifle contemplations for what’s inside

Beneath years of lacquer
Too many decades to count
My fingers trace her hearth
Thick braille fashion a peacock’s spray
Surrounding her mouth where little fires crackle
Bewitching my senses with hickory and pine
And thoughts of blizzards and other seasonal hazards

Fantastic reveries become real from pages
Curled with a cozy throw and tea steaming
A chair too comfortable allowing those pages to meld into dreams

I look around now seeing my sparse decor
The kind only youth can afford
Carnival glass home to a philodendron cutting years old
Leggy with its feet firmly attached to the silver frayed edges
Of her ancient eye
I look and stare back at its dated beauty

Little drawers frame her walls
Solid in their fashion
Jointed little duck tails secure
My mish-mash of belongings
A black and white photo of a scowling toddler
Shoes that hurt his feet and
Tight little newsboy cap
A plastic toy soldier
Keys whose locks are long forgotten
A menu from Six You Get Egg roll
Items too precious to discard
Unless you are not me

Her loss haunts my future
It’s only a matter of time before
The beauty of her heartwood
Whose holes I filled, sanded and oiled
Are discarded for asphalt

And yet I can’t wrap my arms around
The safety net she provided
My limbs in perpetual decline

My sense of drifting away in her deep tub
For years she soothed away
All the pains stored in muscle memory
Her passage too narrow for the
Motor that becomes my legs

Salty water spray my face
Not for me but for her
As all traces of her now
Exist only in my memory
Five colossal steps that part us forever


Kristen Haskell

Posted over on her site Living in the Middle
Listed as #45 over on Magpie Tales 52