Today I am sitting in my back yard at a picnic table writing this blog.  I am looking at the back of my new/old house that was built in 1947 and was advertised as a Cape Cod when we purchased it a month ago.   The clatter from the windows is grating as I watch a man push and pull a large industrial sander over the old oak floors in a desperate attempt to salvage them.  He has told me he can make them beautiful and for a small fortune, I have decided to believe him.

I have been counting down the days this project would begin because once it is finished, I can sleep in a real bed and unplug the blow up one I have been sleeping on for three months.  Once the floors are done, I can sit on a sofa and not a fold-up outdoor bistro chair.  Once the floors are done, I can set up a “real” office and get back to my writing schedule, submit poems, and pay bills, at my neatly organized desk and not at a picnic table with a tote bag for a file cabinet.  Once the floors are done, I can have people over for dinner inside the house and I can binge watch Netflix.

But in the meantime, I wait and look up at the large Italian Plum tree in front of me with its purple-blue-skinned fruit hanging thick on old branches.   I listen to the Scrub Jay in the spent lilac, the sound of a distant lawn mower, the words in Romanian I do not understand coming from the back bedroom, the whine of a small Fed-Ex plane overhead, the neighbor next door watering his potted plants.

And I wait.  For the house to be a bit closer to finished, for my new book of poems, The Lure of Impermanence (Cirque Press) to have its final edit and to not forget a line from a poem in my new book—

Sometimes it’s important to stop—

to imagine a brush filled with Prussian blue
its earthy taste on your tongue
to see a night more richly colored than day

to find
like Vincent
a jewel in the darkness.

Or in my case, a jewel in the waiting.  

Yours in poetry,

Carey