Mary Jo Balistreri
Fourth of JulySitting together on the porch swing.
Sipping Champagne, swallowing bubbles of memory. Ropes creak back and forth. How could we have known—without sparklers, the flap and flutter of tattered twilight, shouts, giggles, commotion of the children—we’d be so lost? Fountains of light cascade from the sky, pinwheels and spiders. Your too cheerful voice offering one more glass. Early Morning BlessingSleep-drugged and slow-moving,
the day sits cold and gray. I cook sugar water for hummers, court orioles with orange and grape jelly. When the sun comes out with its long taper to candle nectar and green silence, shadows falter and slink away, replaced by flickering votives to honor the day. Now red-winged blackbirds flame the air and finches, those haloes of buttery yellow, hover above buds of palest pink until the entire backyard glows in the vast rose window of morning. At a Writers Retreat in the North Woods of WisconsinA heron
braided in reeds and cattails scans the lake bides his time A school of minnows swims south in the pond aware too late of the heron’s spearsharp beak Hunger quenched the blue-shaped flight disappears in a gunmetal sky An intracloud flash brightens night like day Thunder crashes—too close And yet a ruby-throated hummer darts untroubled even as a rush of wind swings the feeder in a wide-wider arc on the porch Rain begins to ping then pelt the windows In our log cabin screen door left open we lie content on quilted beds inhale fresh air and pine the busyness we carried here erased by the green fuse of incipient summer-- receptive to woods and water fire and air our bodymind fills with a buoyancy that almost makes us giddy Your arm across my belly you turn and ask, What in the heck have we been doing with our time? Psalm of a Wild SolitudeThe ocean wears
a rippled silk of blue-green elegance and dolphins bear upon their backs a flash of radiance. GenesisThis is the hour I love--
the day unfolding into itself from darkness into light, the sea and sky yet snug under a gray duvet while the slow rise of the sun uncouples the lovers from that silky crepe de chine. Opening to the softness of pastel, the sea puts on a wrap of palest green while the sky lounges in soft blue charmeuse. I sit in the wonder of beginning, hear breath upon the water, smell the slight salty tang. This is how it must have been, how it will always be, creation happening over and over. Whether the lush garden of paradise or a sea coast in the tropics, everything in flux except for the one thing that stays the same—when Phoebus drives her fiery chariot across the sky, or the God of Genesis says," Let there be light" the world starts anew, the black of night rent apart each day by the blaze. |
Bonnard Remembers Marthe in Evening Light
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