This is the blog form of the original composition. You may also read it as a list on one page.
-
A eulogy of snow falls
-
onto stone-cold April earth.
-
I turn Picasso.
-
To sculpt as worship or as
-
sacrilege, homage
-
or loathing: In wood? In stone?
-
What becomes you? Must I choose?
-
She is ninety-three.
-
Dosing, she breathes well: no pain.
-
Dribble wets her hands.
-
Whisper her name. She sleeps, still.
-
Why shout, wake her for nothing?
-
Blue tissue, ribbons.
-
Within lies Spring, hand knit, in
-
run-off colours, curled.
-
A garland, crafted by one
-
woman for her younger self.
-
Not exactly,no.
-
Black, white, grey: not her colours.
-
Fuchsia clothes her.
-
She creates for another,
-
full twenty years her junior.
-
That second woman
-
wishes to age like her friend:
-
lined, yet beautiful;
-
marked, not scarred; in hardship’s wake,
-
a traveller trav’ling light.
-
Nets strung, loose across
-
paths, through forest leaves and light,
-
to catch a warbler.
-
Covetous, the watchers wait,
-
crave beauty, indigo wings.
-
Vigil,ritual:
-
nets raised at sunrise;migrants
-
define the seasons.
-
From thin nylon threads, sure hands
-
unravel irredescence.
-
Pilgrims all and each
-
journey to sanctuaries,
-
waystations or home:
-
defined by what they seek there
-
or by what it is they find.
-
Salvation: a prize
-
or a curse. In the striving,
-
what is gained? What lost?
-
The spirit struggles, caught in
-
the cruel silks of perfection.
-
Clothed in rags and gold,
-
a penitent, forsaken,
-
seeks worlds in prayer,
-
sifts through sands of discontent
-
that run through, burn her fingers.
-
Sand against windshield:
-
she drives through clouds of mayflies,
-
black above asphalt.
-
Her final turn off pavement,
-
down a lane of spent lilacs.
-
What was she thinking?
-
‘I need beauty, a place of
-
quiet water, stones.
-
Loons’ common laughter, gulls’ cries.
-
Virginia Woolf beside me.’
-
She abandons words
-
and brings a lesson of stones.
-
Awaiting nightfall,
-
she’s blind to cirri, radiant
-
at summer solstice sunset.
-
Her back to the land,
-
she no longer finds wonder
-
in whip-poor-will calls
-
or flickers of fireflies.
-
Weighed down, she swallows the lake.
-
At dawn, not a sound.
-
Why no warblers, no blue jays?
-
in the silence, in the deep,
-
beyond requiem.
-
An object to recover;
-
no longer a soul to save.
-
Why no chickadees?
-
Baystones on shore understand.
-
Ledges underwater know.
-
Her spirit submerged
-
in the silence, in the depths
-
beyond requiem.
-
An object to recover
-
with a boat and body bag.
-
On July the 2nd,
-
no longer celebrated,
-
a mother’s birthday
-
gives evidence her daughter
-
is no one’s child anymore.
-
A dove’s shallow nest
-
on a back deck’s cedar rail.
-
Two, closed-eye fledglings,
-
under a cascade of vines,
-
warmed by feathered breast and sun.
-
What stakes the moment
-
to abandon soft closeness:
-
A predator’s call?
-
New wings, tight-bound in the nest?