The Days to Praise: Anticipation

“These are the good old days,” sang Carly.
I wish I’d known myself. I would have chimed in
Rhyming, harmonizing every minute
With everything we call
Nothing and not much:
Maybe just the feeling of my steering wheel riffling
Through an easy grasp on a late night’s drive,
The state highway chill as the moon-glare’s dance
Rolling with the dashboard lights along my windshield glass.

They are the good old days,
With best things most unknown.
A walk outdoors in any season, anywhere. Just some leaf
Falling clean and dry to asphalt at your feet, or air
Wafting humidly with heat when stepping out the door,
The body for a moment languid. It recovers.

Beyond the good old days
There comes for some a time of no recovery.
They are the days beyond our memory-making,
Past filling in the background on the life that we were painting:
A time our lives stall out to housebound, heading fast for bedridden
Oblivion, and already fallen half-way there.
It is the last, not greatest journey,
Barely journeying at all,
When in the good old days

All life was that: a stepping out
Steeped in a streaming rush of sounds to overhear:
A child’s laughter in a store, metallic chatter from the silverware
In any restaurant; a coursing world that pulsed
With sights and smells in passing, like any unremembered time
We made the calculation, took control, hit the gas,
And easily careened around the slowpoke stalling us ahead,
Flashing past, then back in line, well in advance
Of that opposing car we never did collide with.
The stuff of good old days is not our love affairs
But our flirtations; not the places where we stopped
But the spaces in-between too numerous to track or count,
The steps we took along a way not noticing the composition
And the notes of the song we might have taken in.

So let all who may chime in, right now, with Carly while our voices
Rise as strong, striding through the streets, catching how
The restlessness of light makes all things glimmer, hearing how
Every small sound quivers, shaken in shimmers from out of sheer
Unsoundedness: smallest particles of particulars that matter
In a human world that’s finally made up of all the little quirks
We’re meant to love and sing

Right now:

These are
the days to praise...
{quick snare lick}

These are
the days to praise...
{staggered syncopation, snare to toms}

These are
the days to praise...
{further false starts and sparse falterings, snare to toms, flirting with disorder...}

These are... are...
{held high and long, until percussive, pa-chop! Followed by flailing snare, spacious and disjointed into}:

The good old days.
{Drum roll to floor tom and out.}

###

The reference here is to Carly Simon's song, "Anticipation."

From Original Faith: Falling Towers - Poems of Strength from Disability and Disaster