Whether with Borders, by Marjorie Maddox

Whether with Border, composite photo by Karen Elias (USA) contemporary

Whether with Borders 
                        
These seasons, you’re never sure whether      
the weather of now steps through   
or over the barbed-wire borders     
of others’ spaces, but here the clouds— 
as textured as clogged lungs—hover    
precariously close to the past of then. Face   
 
it; each night, you still breathe in faces 
clamoring across borders—their weather 
of worry: the wind that stalls and hovers 
over the landscape of you. Born a nomad, you threw 
shadows across lightning; watched clouds, 
heavy but mute, re-form foggy borders. 
 
Spaces, wide and open, still haunt, the sky a bad border 
you can’t evict. Her mottled, gray face— 
begging always for mercy—keeps clouding 
the view. Weather, whether, the calm eye of whatever 
blur in the whirlwind you try to step through 
into space that fences home, hovers 
 
in the sun-streaked rain that hovers 
with its empty promise over the bare soil. Borders 
call from across the horizon. You yearn to walk to and through, 
to hold close your cloak of questions and face 
the unreliable temper tantrums of weather 
prophesied in each Rorschach of clouds. 
 
Fair skies/foreboding? The clichés of memory choose “cloudy,” 
that fifty percent chance of happiness hovering 
over your front porch seconds before you decide whether 
to step off into the forecasted storm, just beyond your borders, 
the ones that make you feel safe, but aren’t. You face 
the inevitable, wandering wind; hitchhike through 
 
any opening into the future, now through, 
you promise, with all that’s past. The back-lit clouds 
beckon, and your aging, weathered face 
forges on into the unpredictable. Hope hovers 
in the breeze you breathe beyond borders 
in that lush language that uncovers whether 
 
or not each wave of weather crosses over and through 
to broader spaces, gathering ancestors, former selves, all that hovers 
so close now to hope, to your un-cloudy, border-less face. 
 
Marjorie Maddox
 
This photograph and poem were  previously published in Glint.

Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I(Sandstone Book Award)--the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s and YA books—including  Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Readiing Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards), and A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry;I’m Feeling Blue, Too!--Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry (assistant editor); and 600+ stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Forthcoming in 2021 is her book Begin with a Question (Paraclete Press), as well as her ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias, Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts). For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com