‘Fear of Leaving’

Emerson Little is a lens-based visual artist who recently received his MFA in Creative Photography & Experimental Media from California State University, Fullerton, and his BA in Digital Production from Whittier College. His artistic practice merges art and cinema, exploring liminal spaces with his camera that are both alive and dead.

Fear of Leaving 

Fear of being happy, but indifferent To another's cares and sorrows -- 

Fear of being timid, cautious 

Before the page, the drawing board. -- Yevtushenko 

Listen. The two AM silence 

Is punctuated with the long-drawn drawl Of

a passing freight, slowing to a crawl To

deceive the sleeping city, passing through

With dangerous cargo, surreptitious,

Discreet, even complaisant, 

Amnesia disturbing secure

dreamers With free floating

wanderlust -- 

The silence defiled, yet revenant, 

With fear of being happy, but indifferent. 

You hesitate to breathe too freely, 

Foghorns' antediluvian call 

Rushing in to refill the emptiness 

With their warning-tide rumbling 

Up from the shrouded harbor lights, muffled

Throb of early engines in the shadows. Your

dreams drift from home moorings, To

faraway places with foreign names Lost in a

painful fantasy that borrows Another's cares

and sorrows -- 

You inhale again near the dawn, 

The dangling phone off the hook, 

Grey squirrels tapping at the window.

You resist arriving where you started,

Imagining a bitter horoscope, 

Your stars, calamitous yet auspicious.

Your aura dimming as the day enters

Exposing the walking wounded 

With yesterdays faded pernicious 

Fears of being timid, cautious.

Edward Baranosky crosses the channels and pathways between the visual and the textual as a poet-artist. He has published several chapbooks of poetry, as well as recent Journal and Anthology inclusions, but no full collection. At 78, he is still an emerging poet. Website: https://painterpoet.weebly.com