Poetry: “Saturday Evenings,” by Peter Cashorali

On Saturday evenings time ends but we keep going.
The furniture runs out and the empty rooms go on without it.
Not empty– full of sadness and weird pain, appetites that don’t know what they want but insist that it’s something.
The dead come back, not the people but the times, of being teenaged, twentied, thirtied, the vistas within which whatever was going on did so.
Is there sense here? Not who died or gave us that novel we still have but the floors and horizon and afternoons, the way the walls made corners with the ceilings and held time like a light mist.
Not the contents but the emptiness, nothing happening, nothing needing to.
As if these were movies that were once our favorites, not because of Alan Ladd or Gene Tierney but because of the backgrounds that were never the point,
but we didn’t know that and so never knew what our hearts were restless and disconsolate for,
which was never the doings, never even the people that we hated or couldn’t live without,
but the being alive that is almost impossible to see, a light tinge to the air, a faint but years-long aftertaste of ripe berries or copper, nothing we can put our finger on, nothing for the fingers.
Being alive in time and how hard it is to know it now but looking back you can see what tint everything had, almost green, barely pink,
the lengthening train we see from our window seat as it carries us forward,
the curves of the track back there, the color of the air in those compartments, which are empty, have no travelers because they are the traveler.
That’s living, back there—that’s life.
The mild air in which the busy planet is set, the silence through which the voices walk, the space around which the house is built and furnished,
the celluloid on which the movie is shot, that gives Bela Lugosi his being and on which his face and all his doings are built, that are not the point, though he doesn’t know that, except when time ends, and he can see what he’s made of.

Peter Cashorali is a neurodiverse queer psychotherapist. He lives with Terrance Donley, his husband of thirty years, and practices a contemplative life.