Thursday, February 25, 2010

Coastal Parallax (a poem in decasyllables)


It is just now that one can apprehend
the lengthening day, that one can begin
a retrieval of hours from oblivion;
nebulous transactions between seasons
and Habit, the rotating planet and
silent sunrise shadows lengthening prove.

It comes subtle, or as I've heard they say
"knowable to those on whom nothing's lost";
we came to be on such intimate terms
with daylight and with nightlight, conversely.
One night years ago extended to this
very present and a certain morning
disappeared, hid in shame, dropped quietly
into that which becomes unremembered-

that which makes us whole, and retrievable.
What worth actions unless rendered images?
Lessons of the day scrawled in a tattered
ledger of dreams (the inverse of lessons,
memories shuffled randomly and writ
and erased and re-imagined or lost).

Remember anachronistic kisses
and apocryphal hands holding empty
air in time? Was it snowing there as well?
Or am I superimposing, shuffling
the deck, rearranging the lettered blocks,
making anagrams of hours- dear, I think
it's snowing here, or it snowed, or it will
inevitably, as I was to know.

Letters rest, but might rise in later years
to agonize over a placement or
a purpose, or you may find half your life
was paralyzed wanting something ineff-
able (I'm tempted to write f-able)
under a bough where our coda began.

But the bowler you gave to me rests on
my dresser and dim memories of your
dresses dress my blessed recollections.
Then giant silence, then sunrise, driving
home alone stripped of all magnificence.
It bled out of the horizon, sadder
than the last drop of this winter's snowmelt;
the sky colored a rosé from Bouzy.