Of Light and Shadow
In a sequence of sonnets, I become weary of old dreams -
dusty images that film the windows as sunlight webs the walls …
When away from home, I dream of being home and when
home, I dream of being alone on an island scented
like tangerines and pink grapefruits that writes poems
without vengeance . . .
The difference between now and summer is not you or me,
it isn’t endless poetry, this morning it is merely the buds that
unfurl on the apple trees outside my front door –
My traveling mind is wandering, wondering how many times
(in the weeks ahead) I will take time to notice changes,
and observe the random thoughts with these pencil
renegades - no doubt, to live on in complete oblivion
What do apple trees mean to you or anyone really?
I read wavering smoke - the meaningless upward twists
and tried to translate the ribbons as signals in illiterate
forms of English - I watch subtle movements form another
and yet another horizon - remember some details of our last
dinner together with a need to revise and edit words for a future -
a poem of a thousand unknown languages
I’m inclined, more and more, to notice the warmth of the sun,
the white tentacles on tiny leaves, and the scent of a pure
blank page in my notebook. In the transformations of light
and shadow across white stones and garden statuary
there is the beginning of a poem of dozing spiders
in a nest of leaves webbed in the shadowed corner of the terrace
There is no return to Eden, no end to selfish love stories
their stages of death and dying as the sun feeds the night
A bird labors across the sky in an exile of hieroglyphs
and blazing letters
Deborah Russell, © 2006
|