Still

You may be expecting this poem to take you somewhere,
off gallivanting with secret lovers,
past a windowsill of some great author
or into the dark mind of a tortured soul.

But this morning I awoke in a foul mood,
and I do not feel up to the task of whisking readers away
to grainy windswept beaches of downeast Maine
or noisy city neighborhoods, surrounded by the blare
of cabs honking their way through the square-shaped
metal and glass behemoths of their urban jungle
full of furious-paced citizens careening through a life,
washing over black pavement like a tide of ants through a thicket.

This morning, if you wouldn’t mind, please let me just drink my coffee
and stare out the dusty kitchen window into the pink of daybreak,
where light rain is falling on the yellow birch trees outside.

And if it is all the same, you can stay where you are,
in that dusty corner of the library, or in the privacy of your own bathroom,
having opened accidentally to this poem, buried in a volume that had been sleeping
on the toilet’s water tank lid. Or perhaps you are leaning
against the shelf of your favorite bookstore, or one
that happens to be on the way to where you are headed,
whether that is to meet your son’s new fiancée,
or whether you are killing time before grabbing lunch with a friend.

Wherever you are going, I am sorry I cannot carry you away just now,
to unearth giant statue artifacts buried in the desert,
or to charge through cannon volleys into the valley of Death.
But thank you for letting me stay here this morning,
and burn away the day in my humid apartment, where I hope to finish
my coffee, then lie down on the guest bed,
with a small pad of paper and a couple fresh pencils,
where I shall consider preparing some wonderfully imaginative adventure
you may or may not get around to reading at a later time.