Leaving--By Greg Gregory--United States

Leaving

The space of an empty room is like the space of a cloud, 

an impression of mass, an impression of weight

that isn’t there.  It draws you into its full emptiness.

Rooms and clouds are both simple and complex, like death.

We pick paint swatches for our mood - breath of white, swan dusk,

fleece, sun wash, sail cloth, seashore, forest, darkening sky.

We leave the patina of our fingers, our touch

on walls, on surfaces, sometimes in them.

We darken newly painted wood with every touch

and leave ourselves in it, or try to. 

The dead leave our rooms to discover what they might find,

might touch, on the reverse side of all our painted colors.

They love the slow, soft pearling of window light

that shifts over surfaces, changing each color.

We move through our spaces, our rooms,

believe that we control spaces, define colors. 

We move through breath of white, swan dusk, fleece,

sun wash, sail cloth, seashore, forest, and darkening sky,

insubstantial as a room of clouds

flying to a funeral in a plane at 30,000 feet.

Greg Gregory is retired, but worked in educational media for over 30 years.  His first love has always been language and the printed word.  He has been published in the US, Canada, and England in publications including California Quarterly, Windsor Review, Poetry Nottingham, and The Aurorean.