Sometimes what changes is what makes
the landscape finally familiar, why it never
is becalmed for long: the way the air’s clarity—
stabbed with golden light and glistening
like new skin on the birches— can’t stay
that way. A blur’s already unlatching the frame.
I know this even as my friend turns to me
and says, But surely you deserve some
happiness too? I’m rueful, I know. In that
still life by the window, for instance: my eye
is drawn not to the table with the creamy damask
and the plain but heavy silver. It’s the ochre veins
streaked through the magnolias, it’s their ivory
skirts beginning to droop from the lip of the urn.
It’s the crayon line of fuzz that outlines the too-
soft peaches in the bowl; and beside them, it’s the fly
that’s drowned and gone to heaven in their honey.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Happiness
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
This goes really well with the deepest of deep Delta Blues that I happen to be listening to at the moment (Son House, “Special Rider Blues,” 1941 Alan Lomax field recording). I’m honored to have sparked it.
Curious. Luisa and I responded to the same prompt in TMP. http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com/2011/07/cold-morning-tea.html
I realise my kind of blue is weeping blue. Enjoy your blues, Dave.
Interesting how your mind flitted on this one. You took the prompt with the idea of change and clarity and gold light on birch, and you stick fairly close for two stanzas. Then you flip it—silence being broken by sound making you notice something, rather than the reverse as in Dave’s lines. “Rueful” then leads to other images still in the same color range as the prompt, with melancholy change and decay—then with that little twist back to the gold of light and paradise. Like it!
Did another response to Luisa’s “Happiness”. Check it out.
http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com/2011/07/happiness-graffiti.html
(:–P)