Emptiness

This weekend we are having a lull in our overscheduled lives. Eleanor's high school musical, HMS Pinafore (she plays cousin Hebe), had intensive rehearsals this week and will rehearse even longer next week before the show opens on Friday, but they have the weekend off. Walker's soccer season is over, and he hasn't signed up for a winter sport yet. My symphony concert was last weekend, and we play a children's concert with most of the same music in a couple of weeks, so I don't even need to feel guilty about not practicing. The trustees have come and gone at the local college, so Ron doesn't have to go into work on the weekend for the first time in several weeks.

I don't even have any pressing deadlines today; my mind feels kind of empty. It feels like this poem, Empty Similes, by Bob Hicok:

Like standing in front of a woman who says thank you
when you tell her you love her, that stuck

sound of a crow, pulling the one nail from its voice
outside your window and you

going down to the sea too late, where it was
three million years ago, waving your little towel
at the shadow of waves, like dropping

your stomach when you drop the phone,
a voice spinning at the end of the chord, your mother,
father, everyone

dead, even the person telling you
gone, and you
waving your metronome arm, and time

inside the trees making clocks we check
by cutting them down.

Maybe part of the emptiness is post-election letdown as the days get shorter. I've put away my campaign signs and tacked plastic sheeting over the end of the rabbit hutch for the winter. It's a little past time to take in our garden hose and the clay pots with blackened begonia and basil.