A Whole Day Closer Now Poem by Carrie Eriksson

Aubade Reflection

Courage, Phillip Larkin, for
There is a rare and certain kind of day, marked by sensory sagacity.
A day of no particular plan.
A day of life in full measure.
A day where ends are mere whims, and unrequited too.

The day is unhurried and absent cross words.
Brought to you by our sponsors—all the impertinent, strange and sad days behind you. You're still here.

There are no truly bad days while you breathe and walk, but those past days know how they hurt, and make recompense at times.
A repentance in balance and grace.

Usually confluence means a meeting of mergeable and like things, like forks of rivers, and wise thoughts among the learned and lettered.

But this day is comprised of only you, proof that a confluence of one is true and beneficent.
On this day, serendipity and sense agree on equity.
And you may
Tilt your pretty head and hear a woodpecker
Collecting its repast of the crawling and wriggly hoard as if that tree were a bird-perfect buffet.
That bird is unseen, perhaps imagined,
But then you listen more, to the
The bird and to its seeking.

Ah ha.
This bird has the word.
It Is no less vital to the earth than you.

And you cry for your own insignificant life.
And comfort in it too.

How grand it is to be merely a creature among nameless beautiful creatures, connected in daily toil, death-avoidance, love and agony, hydration and good eats.

This handsome feathered thing, well it's not exactly hope, but it's something like it. Kin.

You understand it's also enjoined in the protection of smaller lofted things—just like the younger ones dancing in your inklings—the ones that descend of old like water hugging a long-melted glacier's wake of stone.

Those 2.0 models that you would surely die for without thought, the ones who own your heart, the ones who take everything, who cause fear and terror more horrid than future news of your own demise.

The versions of yourself you love unabashedly.

This bird Is the same as you and your seeking,
And you wish it well, and for it
To live as long as it can fly
And for it to never suffer cruelty or life beyond use.

You imagine it's nest or nook, and remember an old book a singular departed love read to a tiny you as you nodded—as you decided the best nest was obviously your very own bed.

And this truth seems merely adequate and also sublime, and you cry a little more in profound awareness of your mitochondria being identical to the dirt under you, and the bug waddling by, and the woodpecker still seeking, farther off and away, and how we all wish to keep living.

And how we will continue in other ways, dust or not. And how it all fades and succumbs in the end, ceding the future to new lovely creatures who must have their day.

Considering this is life's harshest notice,
This is a good thing and a quiet thing, and no one detects your doubtlessly accurate proof that the story of everything is comprised of just you, or two.

Yet the bird knows.
And you know this confluence of arms and of wings is beyond testing.
It may be a small thing or a thing dismissed by cynics and those who scorn the love of trees. But you know and the bird knows that the confluence of a moment stands for everything.

On this certain kind of day, your senses are verifiably bionic, and you feel a knowing
Of the trees too, and how they talk to
Each other through mushrooms of divergent magic.
How the soaring silent herd dressed in green leaves and brown, and some bare, manage to mother a mute brood, and do it with no visible tools, and how through hushed roots, they sing their lives under ground and rustle it in their crowns.
and you think you remember before your birth, the time you were inside the trees.

Memory stirs and you recall
How they held onto their kin as they yielded to fire, or axe or beetle, how they went down, standing up.

How they held onto the other roots of their kind,

Abiding intertwining, the perished and the proud,

Grasping roots and vowing only to end if beginning is allowed.

Behold the grand mystery's solution to your mortal heart, titanium knee, and hymns.

The red, fecund soil abides, and the overwhelming proof of life before death—and the sanguine reply of all living things.