RSR ~ POETRY
GRAY MORNING
Gray morning.
Clouds rearrange themselves
in the shifting edges of the dawn.
Vendors hose the
nights detritus
from their sidewalks
and pigeons dance around the spray
to see what is revealed.
I am walking this gray morning
with the day’s ambitions
not yet settling into my steps.
I walk north out of habit,
turn west for variety
and find myself skirting the
slow curve of the Sound -
the water
streaks and tosses
in random reaches of gray.
And I find that every thought
I try to wrap myself around
is hidden by the slow spin
of gray morning.
Three panhandlers ask
without enthusiasm, for small change.
‘Don’t Walk’ lights
blink in empty repetition.
I look to the east for relief
and find that not even the sun
can rise through
the tangled overlay of gray.
I sit upon a broken slab
of retaining wall and wait.
Old black man picks
through a dumpster for tin cans.
Heavy black bird
flies jerkily to the southeast
intent on crow errands.
I look within
and observe my emotions
like flat islands
in dark waters.
I feel the shape
of an unresolved longing.
Touch the edges
of a vague and casual unease.
Heft the mass
of some small, unsettling fear.
This mute continent of soul,
awash in gray,
reaches out from me
like a hard-scrabble wilderness
uncharted, ill-known.
And I hesitate
unable to choose a direction,
unwilling to risk movement.
Morning like this -
shrouded in ambivalence,
heavy and shingled with doubt.
A slow wind backs out of the southwest
unraveling the mist,
rearranging the patterns
of the waves.
I feel cool fingers brush my face
and turn,
some faint stirring within
responds,
an obscure centrifugal force of the heart
nudges me.
I stand and walk.
Gray morning
can not show me clear direction
but waiting is no longer an option.
R.S. Russell