Tomas Vincent Marra Poet Free verse

Geography of Rest

Sometimes 

It is hard to rest 

Some days,
When the body feels like a landscape in winter

When even the quiet roars
loud, and weary.

Where you can not abide in someone else's weather 

The body simply reaches the end 
of its quiet agreements.

You wake and there is only a thinning.

Like a well that has been drawn too often.
The bucket descends and the rope comes back lighter each time.

Moving through the day as if through water.
Small things require more of you and cost more than they should

Somewhere beneath the quiet, 
is something that carries the shape of a mountain
That only moves when it must
Even as it walks the length of my spine

If you sit with it for long
You will know it is older than 
The things you rarely speak about.

Old arguments with the past.
Expectations  like maps.
 A topography of the long effort of trying to be steady when the ground itself moves.

Like an old house late in winter
Where the  past enters dim lit rooms before I do
Setting down a weight I did not choose alone

I keep waiting for a time
A time when the snow is leaving
One quiet inch at a time
Maybe, the thaw comes slow
The dark loosening it's mind

Where the world keeps forgiving
even the coldest ground

Where I am not only my worst 

The snow melted from the darkest places
the ground soft beneath it, to finish its quiet work.

For gravity to gather the water
and send it moving once more
from places that have nothing to do with effort

Walking through the landscape, each step pressing into something that has not yet hardened again.
Until what remains inside
feels like a room with the windows open
and the furniture gone.

My hope is that
Spring doesn't argue

It just turns things around
The roar fades.
The old demands grow distant.
The mountain, moved

You can sit there in the quiet
with nothing left to prove,
nothing left to carry, for a moment.

For two 

And breathe.

Just breathing.

And that, too, 

Could be a kind of rest.

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