Just between night and dawn
the sky is silver-blue
as if the moon had not disappeared
but poured out all she hoarded
deep inside her pallid face —
and the wetland mists
edge it with
a lacing breath
as the distant lights and dreams
are sinking back
at the approach of the sun,
So too the last shade
of another face,
unknown once more,
slips away
like the thinning night.
About half an hour before the sunset
something happens
to the shadows and to the air
and its light —
as Maxfield Parrish, among others,
knew so well —
a sudden sharper clarity and contrast
enters the world amid in turn aroused leaves,
and all that’s infused with life
becomes radiant with a single stroke:
what kind of god is so indulgent and profligate
that he wastes so much bounty and yet so briefly
upon so many mortal, unheeding minds.
But what we know of divine fortitude
and how much patience it takes for souls adrift
to ripen into a drop of elixir to likewise shine?
A line on which letters
flow and curl
to catch your breath and eye,
the delicacy of an arachnoid leg,
its sole, ankle, calf, and thigh,
to pin and plot and map
with the finest of the rifts
which pull and tie
as if it too sought to compete
with Pallas’ subtile weaving art—
sub tela—written finely—
under a cobweb’s geometric loom
for text was once a woven thing,
logos or speech by tekne
was to whirl and twine
rays by rays arrayed
and catch the lightest beat,
heart’s finely strumming pulse.
