Dear Kendra~
I just found this poem I wrote for Alistair and I, years before our separation, and it made me cry. I wrote it after we returned from a trip to France, and I believe there was a wonderful Neptune/Venus aspect happening at the time.
Neptune rules nostalgia, film and photographs, yearning, illusions, and combined with Venus it nurtures romantic idealism at its best. I remember thinking Alistair and I would be together always…such a sense of severance I feel now…
I called the Poem “Old Photographs” as I was imagining us looking together at photographs in years to come—and now it has been over two years that we’ve been apart. I don’t know how we will ever come around to finalizing the separation into a divorce; I certainly can’t do it. It all makes me sad. This must be part of Saturn conjuncting my Sun in the 7th house of marriage. Since Saturn takes over 2 years to travel through each section of the chart, each house, I wonder how it will play out for us? I suppose Saturn here is also capable of re-uniting us, but I haven’t seen signs of it…
Old Photographs
"I was in the café, sitting in front of the potted geraniums
wearing the straw hat I just bought.
I was writing a postcard to my mother
when I looked up to see the shadows
of the early autumn evening
dancing on the stucco walls.
Then you walked by—you were taking pictures of the light.
I watched you… trying to imagine what you were seeing there.
And then you turned your gaze on me
and shot this one here—
a little out of focus—but it was then that I saw them—
the tenderest eyes I’d ever seen.
Look. This is where we found ourselves standing later
by the edge of the river—the one Van Gogh painted.
We walked for hours feeling Van Gogh.
You talked apertures, lens and focus.
This was the hotel, Le D’Arlatan…
Do you remember wandering the back streets—
lost in the cobbled labyrinths—
till we found ourselves here?
The oversized antique bed held expectations. I felt shy.
You said—“Pull the curtains,” and I pulled the heavy curtains back.
I read you a poem by candlelight.
You smiled right into my soul—then served us farmer’s wine
in the opalescent glasses we’d bought that day.
I put the photographs down.
“It was so good,” you say.
“Like the wisp of a dream I can barely remember.”
I lean into your eyes; those milky apertures
transparent with the film of a lifetime.
Now, I offer you wine and pull the curtains open
catching the last dance of light on the peach colored walls.
You put on the old songs…
We sit in chairs by the window,
admiring the blue hydrangeas
our knees will touch, and we will speak about how
the quality of light makes everything different
and everything the same." ~
With love,
Isabelle
