Tea kettle whistle meditation.

Impossible to ignore.

Impossible to move.

Slowly, I inhale the world of scent and sound.

The wild wind blows outside my porch,

Shaking the trees and distant chimes.

The house shifts and creaks and there are footsteps above.

The tea kettle whistle grows louder,

As I inhale deeper and see visions of egrets and regrets,

Of herons and elephants,

Of neon outlines melding behind the closed curtain of eyelids,

And of faces of lovers past with, perhaps, one day new ones along the path.

Beyond my room, a cat knocks something off of the counter,

And a door opens and closes and the whistle grows louder.

But I inhale slower and the wind blows stronger and thoughts gallop by.

At what point do our psychogenic fugues become hedonic adaptations,

And yellow glare realizations become cool, green acceptances?

Past rejections and denials tumble like the browning sycamore leaves across the street,

Tumbling like scraping claws along the asphalt.

And the pumpkins, softly melting into a new fungal state,

Are finally ready for removal, their candlelit smiles live only in photographs now.

I breathe it all in, all of us, everywhere in our own corners of anywhere, together in our aloneness.

My daughter stomps down the stairs like small thunder and says,

“Your water is ready! Can I turn the heat off now?”

I take one last deep intake of past and of presence and answer,

“Yes.”

~