Poetry & Prose by Jo VonBargen

in the depths of
a poet’s despair
somehow for a moment we are
saved by a windfall
of memory: the juiciness
of a fruit, the cold taste of
water, a long ago face
given back to us by a dream,
a rose still blooming
in November, finding
something we thought was
lost, the smell of a library,
a map beautifully
colored, a clock chime,
a sudden pain

there are muses, spirits
that move softly through
the earth, find those that
need touching–touch us,
and move on

we know this because
we are poets, yet like
a river flowing…we pass
but remain, mirror
one another, yet are
as endlessly changing
as the sea

we convert the outrage
of our lives into
sounds and rhymes and music
and verse and in the
end it is a golden
sadness, an eternity of
it, that we reveal

we gaze at this river,
this river of sadness, but
see only our dreams and in
all the days of our lives
run after them madly
though they mostly
vanish, water through sand,
but still we reach
and wonder after them
not imagining they will
always be just
beyond and not ours

there is a limit
to it all and a measure
but we are blessed
with forgetfulness
and there will always be
that one more book
we will never
get to read
and that last farewell
left unspoken

–Jo 2008