You’ve been here before, walked this path
under branches hung with brilliant rust
and yellow— all those moldering leaves
like torches lit for their glow, like lamps
whose wicks are dipped in tallow. For company,
only the nearby gurgle of a stream, the even
crunch of gravel. Solitude’s silver and blue
arrow streaks toward you, lodging like a piece
of ice under your skin. Fragments of salt
that lace the wind. Memory of others
come and gone, their spirits nudging you
toward wherever it is you need to be.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Listening to Piazzolla’s Tango Etudes
- Eating Dried Fish With Our Hands
- Encore
- Dear nostalgia,
- What We Look For
- Without Translation
- Heart Weighted With Cares
- Fables
- Tableaux Vivants
- Listening to Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15
- Fountains
- Dear solitude,
- Nocturne
- Frontispiece
- Landscape, with Notes of Red
- Blue Stone Blues
- Landscape, with a Glimpse of the Soul as it Leaves the Body
- How I Came to Writing
- When does the hunger abate;
- Dear errant winds at dusk,
- Aerogramme
- Dear scarlet-flushed, hydraulic,
- Monday’s News
- Counterpoints
- Landscape, with Traces of Prior Events
- On the Nature of Things
- Spell Against Grey
- Landscape, with Castoffs on the Sidewalk
- Sleepless Ghazal
- Last Call
- Delivery Confirmation
- Landscape, with Early Frost and a Dream Interior
- Campus Elegy
- Petrichor
- Ghazal: Chimerae
- Maguindanao Ghazal
- Insurgent Song
- Paper Ghazal
- Ghazal of the Transcendental
- Hot Lyric
- On the sense of danger or foreboding, the prickling
- Postcard from the Labyrinth
- Hunger
- Debris
- Letter to One Seeking Flight
- Unbelievable Ends
- In the chapel of perpetual adoration,
- Night Rain
- Conversation that Ends with a Dream of Accounting
- Lyric on the Edge of Winter
- Paper Cut #2
- Herald
- Walking
- And once again,
- Prayer Among the Stones
- Call and Response
- Recover
- Dark Prayer
- Song of Snow
- Santa Milagrita
- Song without Strings
- Morning Song
“Solitude’s silver and blue arrow//streaks toward you, lodging like a piece/ of ice under your skin.”
As the weather here dives below zero and both the natural and the spiritual world burrow down into the darkest nights leading up to the solstice, this line–neatly yoking the environment and season with the emotional landscape–resonated with me. Beautiful, clear image.
A response to Luisa’s “Walking”, my “Sounds of Loneliness” is posted in http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2012/12/sounds-of-loneliness.html
correction to above:
http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/11/sounds-of-loneliness.html
correction to above: http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/12/sounds-of-lineliness.html
correction to correction:
http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/12/sounds-of-loneliness.html
Dave,
Could you kindly erase the first three before this? I can’t. thanks.