Dear Colby

Dear Colby…
That is how a letter starts, and if this were a letter
I could fill the lines with inch-thick travel logs,
Half-ripe reminiscence and an occasional emoticon—
That fearful undercurrent in my brain
Beneath the clever
Beneath the specific
Beneath every meaningful cog
Babbling, “Just as I suspected, the words aren’t doing it.”
But it isn’t, and the thing is
Mondays are gone,
David is gone,
Eagan is gone,
And I sometimes suspect that all that is left is memory
And I convince myself that it is so
Hard
To make new ones. And maybe not worth it.
And in the end only a heart will remain
Lying quietly in some well-swept alleyway neatly set aside—
And such is the nature of good intentions.
But I’m feeling romantic, because hard is romantic
And makes for good storytelling
Most people don’t like hard
But prefer a nice story about hard, so…
Once upon a time nature spent ten billion years
And made you
Bystanders all around noted that you used and reused
Tidy canvas bags at the grocery store
Carefully crafted buttons at the county fair
Cleaned up after other mammals’ piss when expected
But failed to note that
You walked very tall
Spoke softly
Looked at the world with a thousand pair of eyes
Two thousand and one lenses, and saturated notebooks with
Peculiar questions about God, love, death.
And this is the part of the story that is hard
You find miles of beauty on both sides of a spinning coin
Refusing to call, while in every direction people shout
Heads or tails.
It is so easy to pain over a thirty-year or thirty-millennia block
In nature’s investment.
Instead of the spinning coin and that lonely heart
In a well-swept alleyway
Neatly set aside
And full of music
:)


Happy Birthday Colby! The Blakes love you. We hope you find all that you are looking for this year.