Circles.

She dreams in circles

Night drivers coursing through

The roundabout outside her house

Tyres sucking tarmac

In a centrifugal hum

Somehow out of phase

With the whirring fan above

Endings create beginnings

Like stars, marriages, love

She boils a brew

Milk and sugar stirred in whirlpools

Watching the dog chase its tail

Kids running rings

Maybe there is form in that

The ever tightening concentric

Regularity of repetition

The infinite circularity of the thing

She works shifts

Walking amongst the almost dead

Changing sheets, holding hands

Hearing their memories

As time folds in on them

Like a self-seal envelope

The past emerging in spasms

Then spinning out of reach in gyres

“Yes, I remember…” becomes “Who are you…?”

I am your son, your daughter, your wife

Completing some cycle

Where we all return to the source

Ending as we became

Incontinent and inchoate

Parked in a bed not our own

In an unremarkable suburb

Our needs tended to by strangers

Who seem vaguely familiar

She watches the news

Sipping white wine 

Appreciating a bird’s eye view

Of a cyclone spiraling off the coast

A series of circles come to reclaim us

Churn us into sea and dust

Above her the fan whirls

And ancient truths unfurl

Like spider web spirals

Portents of a calm 

That will come to us all

After the storm

 

© shaun patrick green 2021