Alone or with Others

Like those dammed daffodils

Wobbling in Wordsworth’s head

Fermenting in the promiscuity

Of his far too-eager heart

I hold close what once was home

Even as each image slurs and runs

Becoming with each liquid memory

A new-washed invention of time

That’s never still just what it was:

A creek that ran bone-cold through

A frame of green and lichened trees

With hard clay fields beyond a house

Red brick and board with, oh,

Bedrooms thinly warm in December

And clotted in the insect-screaming June

Spaces right-angled for family dining

Shared living seven steps up

And seven uncarpeted steps down

With tidy kept corners that never

Cleared for a moment of private thought

Unless one slipped among the rows of books

And sought out the unstable shelves

Of seductive slip-covered solitude,

Or tramped, head down, up the tilted land

Listening for the harsh rush of crows

The shriek of the hard-faced jay

And the sharp cry of the stricken fox

While wondering who

All those tattered people

Chipped like antique china

Really were and knowing how

Uncomprehendingly each sacred day

I would let each of them down

Even as we sputtered and drowned

In the wet-weather springs of devotion.

Kevin Lane Dearinger is a retired Broadway actor-singer and English teacher. Publications: The Bard in the Bluegrass, Marie Prescott, Clyde Fitch and the American Theatre, several plays, and two memoirs, Bad Sex in Kentucky and On Stage with Bette Davis: Inside the Fabulous Flop of Miss Moffat. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines. His work attempts to keep time with his Kentucky heritage, his love of family, his LGBTQ identity, and his own erratic pulse.