Meditation at Cape Cod

Most of us grocery boys and ushers want soft talk
close by: a certain sound of women as the soda shop closes –
their loud whispers to each other. We think of our mothers

fifteen years back, voices settling into a hush like warm covers
back home. It’s when they don’t want to wake their kids but want –
it's only natural – to talk anyway. About food, steamed or baked,

about Sunday salads and barbeques, maybe about the brief peace
of their boy’s nap that opens the house to a little emptiness of time –
for magazines, easy talk on the phone, talk that makes the air largos

of forgiving. Even the older guys remember that talk that brings the world
close to itself where it seems incomprehensible events might be solved:
the lies of unshaven cranks, the dangerous sliding of crustal plates

full of fossils, held, golden brown – all these
finally sorted out, and the long summertime beach and sky
softly explained around us, sure as eternal freeze frames inside naps

and other speechless tracer-bullet dreams that flash off through the dark,
all that slow understanding, an understanding men at nineteen
cannot hope to string out in words. But when we hear the low,

fluffed-pillow woman talk, we quit our jigging impersonations a minute, quit
the soda-jerker dances of wiseacres convinced that a six-pack
makes a man. We hear the whispers, we change – suddenly

know a slow thing about bobwhites who gather into peaceable coveys,
gather again – in the parts of night where breathing can pause – into a time
of compacted heat. A huddling circle form. And we turn our heads

toward inscapes, travel backlands, walk into that cabin –
cedar closets, neatened stacks of yellow towels, pine-green blankets
promising the hush of warmth, promising to set things right.

Tim Bellows is a poet, writer, and teacher – devoted to wildland, the simplicity of inward travel, and Mozart’s notion about “Love, love, love” as “the soul of genius." Living in Northern California, Tim has taught college writing for over eighteen years. He graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has seen publication of poems in many journals – and in A Racing Up the Sky (Eclectic Press), Wild Stars (Starry Puddle Press), and Desert Wood (University of Nevada Press).

If you’d like Tim’s free Lightship E-Newsletter of tips for creative writers on the journey of “divine things more beautiful than words can tell” (Walt Whitman), contact him at star999@sbcglobal.net and put "Yes!" in the subject line. (Put "Unsubscribe” to be taken off the list.) *** Visit timbellows.com where his books and selected poems are available, toll free.

Email: Tim Bellows

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