talismans

 holding memories

what can reach across the long years

and hold a memory of what a day really held

that mattered enough to transcend the clearing restart of the next day?

what a moment felt like when the mundane glimmered bright,

as if the sun just cleared a mountain above

and showed us a moment that really mattered,

my wife is working on a project

of artifacts, of talismans, which, somehow,

in the essence of their physicality,

serve as nucleus around which emotions circle,

images appear within that circling mist

that would not endure without having the central crystal

through which to shimmer back into reality,

for oh so brief, but oh so real, transcendence,

near two months have worked upon this mountain place

since I was last here,

a place that has long served as a nucleus for my life,

a constant, a place that stays much the same,

and allows my heart to circle round it,

I remember the time I toddled in the creek

mesmerized by water and sand,

by their dance down the mountain,

and my clumsy attempts to dance with them with boats and dams,

creations in the sand, ephemeral as sand castles at the beach,

I've returned here through all the constancies and upheavals 

of family celebrating hellos, and wrenched by good-byes far too often,

we'd always like for more to have held constant,

I mourn the people who can no longer sit around our tables,

I treasure pictures we took and saved of circles of hearts bound together

which call up the gain while also murmuring of what is now the loss,

today I mourn a great oak tree,

damaged by the Great Fire about 8 years ago,

a tree that we had to have cut and removed

for the safety of the next circles to come here,

we'll have its base there for decades

to hold memory within its table-like surface,

where each ring can murmur loudly to whoever visits

of each year it thrived across the last century,

we have a split-rail fence in the yard,

cobbled together from a few old chestnut rails from a hundred years ago,

from yellow locust rails I split myself 60 years ago,

and cedar rails a new neighbor shared with us,

the present structure ordered, and perfect,

yet it, too, will not last,

I have long been drawn to cross-sections of tree,

within which the growing and fallow parts of the year

make their mark and hold time in their totality,

as if time could be held,

I got a few sections of the red oak's lowest trunk saved for me,

they stink, though, where they're stored in the basement,

an aspect of the type of oak they are,

some talismans are challenging

in the visceral reality that circles around them.

by Henry H. Walker

February  25, ‘25