Tuesday Poem: an old one that seems right for this time of year

 




A Basket Of Chestnuts

Listen to them rolling around.

Like the sound of rain falling
soft on chestnut horses
caught grazing in the paddock,
as big drops slap their flanks,
so they feel alive alive
awake awake awake.

The simplicity of bodies
sensing air, cold water, and rising mist.
And then the rain begins to intensify,
like cellophane uncrumpling itself,
the sweet already in your mouth,
and maybe you have a cold, a cough,
as you walk through the citrus leaves,
breathing eucalyptus
and thinking, always thinking.

Walking and humming a deep tune,
warm in your woolens, wayward
and sheltered by the trees,
still yawning and stretching
their way toward dun colored sleep.

And doesn't the path wind its way
into your mother's kitchen?
Where something sweet is baking,
incubating; soon to be born?

It's morning and she's singing
setting the table. You pour
coffee for the women gathered there,
the aunts, grandmother, sisters-in-law,
cousins, nieces, all listening and telling stories,
wringing their days instead of their hands.

The sound of spoons swirling in the cups,
the patter of talk like drizzle now, like hail,
like thunder once in awhile too, the nods,
and laughter steaming up the windows.

This is what shaking the basket can do:
transmute an afternoon into kindness,
solitude, kinship, sweet memories,
freed from the burr every
autumn to keep us warm.

Here. Why not give the basket
a shake or two yourself?
See what's rolling around,
smoky rich, inside of you?