Floating
I’m lighter than air
as I glance around the
room where I write.
I see a dreamlike life
in snapshots of me, who
I was and who I will be.
The row house where
I was just a kid,
a monument of cement
and brick is so much
more as a flood of memories
washes over me.
Colleen and I in the early days
next to a photo twenty-five years later
while now we’re pushing fifty and
finding out we can take nothing for granted.
Anniversary photo of my parents
who’s substance is inside me more than I used to think.
They are next to an unknown enigmatic couple from
the old country found in a family album. Their stern faces
reflect a troubled time before my grandparents
escaped to this new world.
Three pictures of Todd Rundgren whom we called toad
in junior high and became a rock star surrounds my
Bar Mitzvah picture with me in the center of a
family with suits, flowers in lapels and fancy dresses
that looks like it deserves to be in a period movie.
Vacation picture of me on the beach with a son on my
shoulders and one on my lap, palm tree in the distance
strangely foretells where both of them now live.
Below my computer screen is a postcard of the Rocky statue in front of the
Philly skyline from where I grew up. Also photo of a spiritual gathering in India
and postcard of the East Berlin soldier jumping over barbed wire in the early days
of the wall that is famous in Berlin.
My high school graduation photo is above the tipi I pitched with no idea what
to do next in my life. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by slowing
down my life and asking the powers that be to please guide me.
What I learned is that sometimes if I’m really lucky, the stars are aligned and perhaps
fate ties in somewhere…I can jump and the net will appear.
