Untraveling (Thursday Doors)

photo by Deborah circadianreflections

I had forgotten what I did there–
the entire structure of my former
life stood flattened into a permanent
ambiguity, like a film I had only seen
as a trailer, an intersection
of absence and speculation.

I found a door but there was no room inside.

I encountered each new year
with a stubborn diminishment–
not perishing but languishing
in a refusal to become
completely dead.  I became
one of the landscape’s invisible
occupants, singing ghostly laments
on the wings of a hollow chord.

I found a door but there was no room inside.

My fate rests now
on the vestiges of a cross
roads where nothing
ever arrives or departs,
where even time
can no longer be borrowed. 

I found a door but there was no room inside.

I chose Deborah’s door photo, above top, from the Thursday Doors Writing Challenge, because it fit so well with two dVerse prompts I wanted to do: to compose a bop poem (from Laura) and to write about wandering (from Jade Li). Instead of finding a box, as the bop poem prompt suggested, I found a door.

The collage doors are from a series I did in the 1970s. Even then, I was interested in doors.

And find more doors, as always, at Thursday Doors, hosted by Dan Antion.