If this is the middle, how long does it last? Once only, I may have come close; but I was never that girl who might have lain in her two-piece suit across the bed of a truck or on a beach under an overhang of rock, saying Let’s give them something to talk about, baby. Forever the wallflower then, even in math class: moving the popular girl with skin like almond cream to stride past in study hour and yank in disgust the extra pencil I’d tucked behind my ear. That calculus is over. This rain at dawn, though: in the half-light, how it makes the green more vivid, how the faltering songs of wood-thrushes chime like timepieces from another world. The flare is brighter still from pent-up longing. The world hasn’t gone away; its roots push deeper. The wind on my tongue tastes like salt from the sea; this late in life I want to roll up the cuffs of my jeans and walk without stopping along its wavering edge.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Always a Story
- Landscape with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting
- Letter to Implacable Things
- Landscape, with Cave and Lovers
- Miniatures
- Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here
- Ghazal with a Few Variations
- Letter to Silence
- Landscape, with Returning Things
- Postcard to Grey
- Not Yet There
- Letter to the Street Where I Grew Up (City Camp Alley, Baguio City)
- Between
- Parable of Sound
- Letter to Providence
- Glint
- The Beloved Asks
- Letter to Longing
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Twenty Questions
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Interlude
- Villanelle of the Red Maple
- Letter to Leaving or Staying
- Salutation
- Letter to Love
- Letter to Fortune
- Territories
- Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
- Dear season of hesitant but clearing light,
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Singing Bowl
- [temporarily removed by author]
- Risen
- Refrain
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Dear heart, I take up my tasks again:
- Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Risk
- Vocalise
- Tremolo
- Interior Landscape, with Roman Shades and Lovers
- Bird Looking One Way, Then Another
- Gypsy Heart
- Landscape with Carillon
- Letter to Ardor
- Marks
- Landscape, with Sunlight and Bits of Clay
- Slaying the Beast
- Measures
- In a Hotel Lobby, near Midnight
- Landscape with Shades of Red
- Between the Acts
- Letter to Duty
- Letter to Nostalgia
- You
- Song of Work
- Balm
- Landscape, with Wind and Tulip Tree
- From the Leaves of the Night Notebook
- Letter to What Must be Borne
- Redolence
- Letter to Myself, Reading a Letter
- Night-leaf Tarot
- Trauermantel
- Foretelling
- Aubade, with Sparrow
- Reverie
- Mineral Song
- Layers
- Prayer
- Proof
- Landscape as Elegy for the Unspent
- Vespertine
Ah, but you have given us something to talk about, even so :-)
A CIRCLE’S SHADOW
(After Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn)
It the sea eats limbs of love, so love, so life, may not
to its eternal wanting finish what it late started must
soon deny: a clown’s journey through a circle’s
shadow, the circle rending rapture, where, threatening,
the Shadow begins what beginnings should have done:
to fill the empty cups, the gaping tables, with lilies
of the marsh, and vases of the Sun. But the circle
and the shadow uniting are miracles come the Sea,
its womb and lilies devouring. Perhaps you are right.
Desire’s pent-up longing is brighter still, stinging still,
and will never, ever go away, like the homing waves
that take us back, take all things back, to a beginning.
—Albert B. Casuga
05-08-11
The 8th line should read:
and the shadow uniting are miracles come from the Sea,
(please insert “from”) Thanks.