Confluence

This is a poem that I first drafted one night in early January when my son was home on break from college. There was a restlessness in the weather that matched my own (I'm rarely up at midnight) and then I was writing it I heard my son at work in his bedroom music studio, manifesting a different kind of purposeful restlessness.

I let the poem sit for a while and then brought it to Joe Tsujimoto's writing group yesterday afternoon, where I got some useful feedback that gave me a way to go back into it. Probably not done yet, but getting there:

Confluence

The wind is up tonight, tearing at the louvres, sweeping
along the outside walls of our condo and clutching
at the corners with distraught whistles and moans.
It seems to seek a space in which to flow free, a world
flat and frictionless, mirror-smooth beneath the blackened sky.

In the next room, my son stitches syncopated rhythms
and fragments of songs into a beat to back the rap
that even now is on his lips, pulsing forward, words emerging,
surging, swirling in search of a shape that will hold the freight
of his urge to create a sound that is fresh and seductive and true.

Then there’s me, alone in the living room at ten before midnight,
pencil in hand, trying to lay the loose ends of my thoughts
into a line of syllables that will tame the restless currents
flowing through my mind, assume a shape that satisfies
and sends me off content at last into the stillness of sleep.