Judith Brice
Sometimes I Forget the SunsetSometimes I forget the sunset,
her light listing its way to the west and skeins of fuchsia falling slowly to her knees-- Sometimes, I only see shadows, as they umber the road, mist all grass and meadows underfoot, then drench their fields with desolate dark-- But quickly a leaf of aspen might quaver me awake, rustle my slumbering mind and grab my gaze-- sweep my eyes to catch silken embers of sun as they topaz the sky. Chiaroscuros ☊Dancing their world like dappled ghosts
my shadows dissipated to chiaroscuros-- fleeting images of moon yielded slowly to dawns of warmer days as frozen fields broke from their fright and shimmied forward to sun. Then sunflowers, wheat budded up to radiant dreams-- Unfolding seams of life & mind bloomed to flower at first with hesitance, at first in shade, and then into a frisson of Light as she opened her wings to spring. Only then I could hear shining ripples of Time, the horizon on her salty breath, her silver terns swooping as seconds ticked into a glow of glistening song. Mourning CallsFrom beyond the brume,
beyond the horizon she swims, the mallard’s mate, a wail for a call, brief, before the wait for her next plaint, shortened and hoarse From around the cove she floats into the evening lake, as its restive waves batter the reeds, tawny and coarse among the gray, the wind-tossed rocks. She keens, still mourning-- pleads Out into the wind she drifts, her westward whines without hope, amidst the singe of twilight, a solitary slipping of sun, singing its own vast and disappearing song The Raccoon BallI watched it all day out the window
at kindergarten-- I’m sure of it, Mom. It was sunny, no rain, no clouds. I could see it for sure, the gym next door, all those inside rooms. And there it was, the black and round raccoon ball, pounding one wall, then the next. And they all kept crashing down when that big old ball kept hitting the doors, the windows, and building sides after it swinged way up. Boy mom, I could really see it. Even furniture, Mom, smashed into pieces! I saw a yellow truck on the ground and a little man working levers—two or three—. And, oh yeah, I saw a couple of long lines close up to the sky, before they ‘tached on that one last lever-- Really high, it was, I swear it, before those long lines came down and ‘tached again to the raccoon ball, all big all black, which swinged wider, stronger, wilder. The rooms went to small pieces. Doors cracked, too tiny splinters of wood. All more and more a wreck. Spring
Coda— At The JettyIt was the haar of the sea
we heard— then the gulls, their shiver, as they swooped stealing the fog, drawing it in and down beyond the dusk, the damp, the cage of cold-- and at the shore the line of silver birches, peeling pummeling the wind and our now vacant souls. ♢ |
These Three Years--dark days, deceit of meaning
month after month-- weeks of winters wrenching their bare, foreboding arms. No chocolates, no sweet potatoes, nor magnolias, daffodils come spring; only the coldest winters of snow. Words too many for doctors to write in tomes of tattered pages-- long since torn, scattered. Days and months-- time and seconds taut, while answers absent, elusive float only in doubt. Waiting rooms broadcast show after show: Wolf the View, the Talk camouflage all agony, all angst. My doctor suggests a walker, ‘exercise equipment,’ he opines-- while I hold my mask, place it with care around my face. More anguish than a soul could know more struggle than a poem can own. The Days That Have Left MeThese are my wildest hours
of surrender, where my minutes tick my clock back to midnight and the seconds get too close to black, to bleak. These are the days that have left me– blind, in a flurry of wasted soul, a body yearning for rest away from the searing pain that scorches to flame. I tell only of the wrench and wrest of limb from limb, the wish to be free and alight on pine needles under full cover of violet evening, rocked in a cradle of molten moonlight. Overhead From LongingSometimes, your voice catches me from
beyond and overhead, from your longing love—I think of your timbre, the tremolo and cords it strikes, reminiscent always of starlings, their cantabile speech, as they learned to sing— no, talk, to Mozart. Was it he who learned and copied their joyful trance or they who conveyed back his sweet noise to wrap him in a swoon of song so sonorous that he composed concertos so plangent that when he wrote his resplendent Masses, he was able to catch an audience in rapt and full attention, swoop his listeners Into an evanescent murmuration as dense and wide as the starlings, when they disappear of a sudden into their wild and mysterious flight? Fall AgainAnd the sun speaks only
to trees, echoes off turning leaves when they catch bright whirls of wind-- while starlings, caramel brown, sneak between blowing seeds and ruckus of gilded, locust coins-- as squirrels patter on branches, chase to nearby tips, then quick hurl to hawthorns as if in trespass by the sky, all to catch the season’s spin of pinwheel colors-- tangerine, burnished bronze, ocher red-- as they fall again. LesbosUp onto the rocky shore they washed,
small bodies between delphinium blue and sparkling breaking waves, which tumbled from the Aegean water, the sky-- but no one new knew their names Up onto the rocky shore they washed, yellow life jackets that were only toys, never promised to be devices for flotation, for rescue never promised to save lives-- no one knew whose lives, what names Up on the rocky shore break more waves, more small bodies without names, families lost; no play in the summer sun, no splashing in the salty sea. No one knows their names. No Moon ShadowsI can’t find your God
in the graves of my pain, no moon shadows to pluck from evensong nor steel stillness in silhouettes of these sneaky weeks to come. I can only feel one long restive scream, too many creaking fissures in bones once rent and no peace or silence in my home. |