At the Sight of the Ohioan Dawn My Soul Would Soar

 

The exquisite dawn’s song, the other

kind of seeing that quietly and gently swaps

an ear for an eye—just as in love the limbs

and the soul too somehow remember

 

to be and become interchangeable—

once more reminds me of the evening—

the day’s opposite end—which I saw

from a window as Ohio’s low horizon

 

was being filled with the muscat light

turned into wings in flight over the new

sudden cyan sea coming through

and out of the sunset short-lived nick.

 

There are in life few moments like these

when our senses’ and the heavens’ seals

are moved and the time’s flow itself

would pause in between its mellow waves

 

to stay still and transparent and make us too

for a while so as well—and then there is

that sudden soaring, stunning elegance

which we must have seen somewhere before

 

and of which we have always deep down dreamed

and to which we still gravitate—back to the thrill

in which the light breaks into trill and delight,

and on that rim of existence and space and time

 

one tastes of passing grace—its assurance

and promise, vouched in that splendor and its arc,

where beauty sheer is—oh, sheerly disclosed,

and a tang of the immortal marks in us her lot.