Poem for Thursday, Local Daffodils, Before We Go

Eclipse
By C. Dale Young

Admit it. You return to the past because you
have gained some kind of knowledge to interpret it: 
the titanium device with its four pins meticulously
buried in your skull, the sunlight from the window
reflecting off its edges to cast fractured lines of light

across your chest and across the hospital bed,
the rays of light appearing to beam from this metal ring
around your head (like a goddamned angel), or
the way when your nurse flicks it with his plastic pen
it vibrates in a key you cannot yet name. Call it

the key of metal, of titanium, of shiny misfortune.
Admit it, the present is awfully dull and will remain so
until many years later when it comes miraculously
into focus, when you understand the meaning of
the word regret. So it is you go back, armed now

with the word halo, the word rife with what
you have learned about the depiction of angels
in Renaissance painting, the ring or rings of light painted
by the old masters so as to hover lightly around the head. 
And how can you not see with this knowledge, knowing

as you do now about the terrible wings you keep
and continue to keep secret?  Some would argue
we keep secrets because we cannot help ourselves. 
But what if secrets are kept simply because we have yet
to make sense of what really happened? 

The moon in latest afternoon, just days ago, hid
a segment of the setting sun, and there before us a mandorla
without even the faintest sketch of a god or angel beneath it. 
Admit it, I am not alone: things beg for significance.
Would that we always had the time to come back to them later...

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Adam went to visit his girlfriend in Fredericksburg all day Wednesday, so I had a pretty normal, boring day of getting things done and enjoying the weather. Around lunchtime, I met people in the park for a raid and took a walk to see the hillside of crocuses; then, after a stop at CVS for shampoo on sale, I also took a walk around my neighborhood because there are daffodils blooming everywhere:













Paul made tzimmes (stewed potatoes, yams, butternut squash, carrots, and fruit) for Purim, plus we had hamantaschen from my parents while we watched Before We Go, which I saw was free on Vudu and had had on my list because of Chris Evans and Alice Eve (the best reasons to watch it as the screenplay is meh), then caught up on The Flash (once again the season is going on too long).