Elegy for Monday by Donald Brandis

Gone into hiding like rainwater

soaked into the land or run off

elsewhere in its cycle, our cycle

Monday passes at our convenience

what it does without us is hard to see

since we’d have to not be there to see it

as some say we always are/aren’t

What we can see if we’re patient and open

is the periodic long slow staged exit of moonlight

taking its necessary darkness with it

seemingly away but really

into hiding, into the vastness of now

the mother of retention and re-invention

 

You’d not think it rocket science

finding the subtle now’s former occupants

of a moment ago, or a week, a year

not among memory’s card tricks

but as they were, so we think must still be

or how can today be real?

Be plain as our nose we feel but cannot see

except in mirrors known to lie

each morning when we look

for our yesterdays’ selves there

like a curious person searching in a closet

or a drawer, a cupboard for what they’d lost

and can’t relocate in the furtive now

a loop of unexamined prayer beads fingered

 

A slate-grey Seattle day rained in and out

mostly drizzle with bursts of nozzled spray

wearing away layers of irritation down to acceptance

to glimpses of casual blessings

 

 

About the Poet:

Donald Brandis is a retired healthcare worker living quietly outside Seattle writing poems. Some of his work has been published in Amethyst Review, Leaping Clear, Blue Unicorn, Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere.  His latest book of poems is Paper Birds (Unsolicited Press 2021).