holes

as i hugged the girl goodbye last night
i turned my head and was caught
by the sight of the paint-chipping holes
where now-absent nails once held
something hanging on the wall. 

they are wall-scars,
memory vacuums. 

now the wall is decoration-deprived,
like a woman of high society in the nineteen-twenties
whose parasol has blown away with the wind. 
the wind of time. 
the wind of moving on. 

what hung there, i wonder,
who-knows-how long ago,
greeting my fellow passer-through-hallways
as he came home from a night
of painting the town red
or a day of long red tape at the office?

perhaps it was an empowering portrait
of the family he left to find a new life,
who let him go with their most heartfelt blessings
and the few dollars they could spare. 

or a rosary, or a crucifix,
a more-than-daily reminder of the cosmic force
that he believes gave him this new life--
and the old one, for that matter;
the power than could just as easily remove him from the earthly plane
as a frame from a wall. 

and having done so,
the almighty wouldn't simply walk down the hall,
cradling the fantastical frame in a curled arm
like a school book--

but it would extract the nail as well,
the handhold,
the last outstanding truth that we cling to,
so that only emptiness remains.

--not the emptiness of despair,
but of potential. 

for we carry our lives about with us, framed and glossy,
perfect until they fall. 

and we search for holes to fill,
the ones that are already there,
that have already deepened and widened with memory. 

so we must use bigger nails to fill the holes,
which can hold bigger frames,
ideas, loves, philosophies
until your whole life surrounds you,
cradles you,
and will one day rock you to sleep
as you feel yourself gently released from the wall on which you've hung for so long. 

not to be taken down,
for the wall itself has dissolved
and with it the hole into which your nail was fastened. 

and you realize
that now you are fastened to eternity
to existence itself

to the wall of the wind.