I feel a need of cleansing.
Briskness against my palate to scrub this year away.
I imagine a scoured veneer where hope will again find adhesion.
Like a wooden planked deck, stained by time and life,
made fresh with a stiff brush doused in water
and drawn across a salted surface.
My spirit craves this reckoning with the elements.
These artifacts of baptism providing me too with renewal.
Both ingredients of the sea. Washing over me almost battering.
Too much dust has settled on my sensibilities.
Solitude and uncertainty have soiled my gaze.
I will start again in water and salt.
Rick Christiansen has been a stand-up,comic, an actor, director of the improvisational comedy group The Underground and a corporate executive. His poem “Killing Bob Dylan” has been selected for inclusion in an anthology from Alien Buddha Press this Fall. Rick lives in Missouri near his eight grandchildren.
