Day 20 - On the coast

By a disused bar
along the empty coast
of a country
whose name I won't tell you,
she lets go of my weatherworned hand
that she has been leading me by
for a hundred miles
to pull apart the wooden boards
shutting and shuttering the windows and doors.

I never thought
I'd be back here again,
where it all began.
Where the saxophones were played
until the darkness  was swept away by dawn
and the bitterhearts of the drinkers were smoothed
by smokeroughed voices
on a stage just six inches high.

Now the ocean
beating out its rhythm
on the shore
in time to the falling chipboard panels
is the only sound that hits my ears.

The first sunlightshafts
in forty years
spill onto the floor.
I'd like to say it caught the dust unawares,
agitating it into excited patterns and forms
by sheer energylight.
But there was no dust
it had left long ago.

I enter after her,
blinking my eyes into darkseeing the
table and chairs piled against the once mirrored wall.
A shape on empty floor marks the oncebar,
another the piano ghost.
And now the sounds of longago
invade my ears and crowd out the now,
until the room once more is full of music and chatlaugh.

I close my eyes
and remain unable to open them again
lest when I do I'll see the pastlife reborn
as we watched our heroes on the stage.
But my real hero was sitting next to me.
        
She takes my hand and pulls me back to present
and I look into her steady eyes
a light to guide me to the shore
and I love her,
A yearvast love hooked in the single point of now,
like a mountain balanced on a
tree.

One tip
reaches back to this old hangout
were we once made lifeplans
of longsome years
that worked.