Everything is still here

[71degrees]

Everything is still here

as I exhale, unfurling worries
as wisps of silk that purl
and shimmer in puddled moonlight,
each breathed into hindsight
by the first stars I ever saw.

A frozen one third acre of silence
amplifies echoes of innocence
that rustle in the briars
and sloe bushes, as I did
when still small enough
to evade their barbs.

Tumbling from ivy clad banks
I'd lop the heads of daffodils
we planted one October.
Planting patience you called it;
Digging the past
to bury the future.

Youthful unkempt clouds of daisies
blanket the deep sleeping bulbs
and I recall scepticism
of a promised blossoming;
I know better now
as you did then.

A salt and sugar crust
coats the stone garden shed
where I served out my sentences
among pitch forks and pick axes;
Discipline and consequence
cemented within its walls.

The old stooped chestnut stands stoic
flecked with strands of snow.
He's outgrown my treehouse
and stopped dropping conkers
since I stopped stringing them.
"...needs felling..." you noted recently.

I won't hear of it, the sapling can wait.

The dull beat of unseen swans
arrowing across Farnhnam field
and plashing the inky floodwater
drums the reflection of a forgotten question
of departures and transience.

"Where do they go Dad?"
"You'll follow to find out in your own time."

Roused by the door handle's cold click
and warm escaping clinks,
I turn on the threshold
pausing to inhale,
absorbing stillness.
Everything is still here.

Aesthetically, this is beyond wonderful. Right down to the "door handle's cold click" as you shut down the poem and come full circle from title to last line. Unfortunately, you present this wonderful, picture post card of your youth and don't let me in. The poem is filled w/abstract words and images (that I admit are wonderful, I've already said that) that mean something to you b/c as you tell me, "Everything is still here." You say it over and over and over but you don't let me inside to what they "really" mean except, "Everything is still here." I do note that the chestnut needs to go but you prefer to wait (to keep things as they've always been?). If you want to give me a Hallmark moment, lovely, dark, and not so deep, you have succeeded. I felt somehow empty and wanting much more by the time I finished. Everything is indeed still there…but shouldn't it be more than just physical things?