Mark,
I liked your poem. I have always liked your poems.
And I was going to say so, too, once. But you know me.
I am unaccountable that way.
I liked them not so much for stand-out lines,
but because of the way they move steadily
forward with grace and authority and maturity.
I'd like to be able to write like that.
"Sherry" said about your "Taking Shade With Buddha"
As you say in your signature line,
poetry is a place where the reader can take refuge.
I felt such a sense of peace come over me
when I arrived at the end of the last line.
A beautiful poem.
and I was going to say that maybe what she meant
was the same kind of thing that I was beginning
to feel as I read the poem. Namely, an increasing
confidence that none of your lines would ever
make me cringe.
(Not that I'd ever argue that making people cringe
isn't a perfectly valid art form. It's just, that at my age,
I must have already seen every possible
variation in the cringe-genre, and my
cringe muscles are grateful for the rest.)
I liked
A lock of your hair tied with lace.
I found it in a box in the kitchen drawer,
next to the sun and moon.
It reminded me of two things.
First, of course
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya.
She tied you to a kitchen chair,
She broke your throne and she cut your hair,
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.
- LC
which already had moon and hair in the kitchen, for ya,
where any tidy person would be obliged to put them back
in the drawer when done using them, as we were all
properly brought up to do.
And it reminded me of this
I look at the floor
and I see it needs sweeping.
Still my guitar gently weeps
- George Harrison
Nothing comes close to the words "kitchen" and "sweeping"
for invoking a sense of the mundane (unless it's "kitchen midden".)
And, if you are missing someone,
then nothing comes close to the mundane for invoking melancholia.
This is because "kitchen" and "sweeping" and things like that
remind us of the things that we are required to do
simply to stay alive. Which, then, reminds us that,
as human beings, simply staying alive isn't enough.
We need a reason.
So, when we are unhappy, and notice that the floor
needs sweeping, sweeping the floor is the last thing
we are likely to do. Because it just "rubs it in"
that we need more. So we procrastinate.
We do "more important things first".
We play the guitar. We post posts on the internet.
We reminisce the days we had the time
for the sun and moon.
There was no suggestion that you were looking
for hair in a box in the kitchen drawer.
The implicit implication was that finding it there
was an unexpected turn of events.
You must have been looking for something else.
Something much more likely to be found in a kitchen drawer.
Something to do with assisting in cutting up and transporting
food stuffs short distances from plates and cartons to mouths.
You were hungry. And in that state the blood
is drained from the brain down to the muscles required
to procure, prepare, and ingest food.
And the organs used to digest it.
Nature has removed everything else from the mind
that could possibly distract from serving the survival
instinct.
But then, unexpectedly, you found the box with
the hair in it. Which flooded your mind with the
farthest things from your immediate mundane
kitchen prison. Celestial images with past
personal associations swung open your
kitchen prison doors and released you to a moment
of pure rapture. A moment of exquisite pain.
Because pain is nature's way too. Pain,
any pain, whether you know this or not, is just
"nature's way of telling you something's wrong".
Natures way of reminding you that your old reasons
for eating aren't valid anymore. Nature's way
of motivating you stop pigging out, burn the box,
get out of the kitchen, and "get a (new) life".
~~
The concern earlier in this thread
over sun and moon and soul
reminded me of something that my niece once said.
It was early one morning, and we were going out for breakfast.
My brother-in-law was carrying her.
She was 1 day old.
He was suffering at the time from certain flu-like symptoms
of pride and prejudice and terror at having accomplished her,
and of the shock of recognition of the overwhelming momentousness
of the many instances of trivialized and long forgotten occasions to him,
that were occurring to her for the very first time,
in her freshly picked little life.
In this case, her squinting and sneezing at the sun
caused him to jubilate: "first time she's seen the sun."
Which incited the occation of the very first words
she ever spoke. She said: "I've seen better."
(or faces to that effect.)
~~~~~~~
Soul loss can be observed today as a psychological phenomenon
in the everyday lives of the human beings around us. Loss of soul
appears in the form of a sudden onset of apathy and listlessness;
the joy has gone out of life, initiative is crippled, one feels empty,
everything seems pointless.
- Marie-Louise von Franz
. Well described 
. Twenty-two years later, I still have a lock of a man's long hair... one who was just so sensual, with his hair quite representative of that. I just never considered putting it in the kitchen drawer, so this detail immediately arrested my attention.
.
.
