White flags waving unseen

Mornings Like This

when July slips through the hills like an iceberg, her
fire gone out, the sun kettled in a grey gauze as I rise
dappled with gooseflesh after days sweating rivers.

Rabbits venture out reluctant to give up the night's
warmth curled among their kind, emerge with tapered
ears loath to heed the chill clarion of such early quail.

Across the far meadow, a talonary shape sits a limb
of tall eucalyptus. Everything alerts she is there, yet
something inevitably forgets to hoard caution.



In the lowlands, gracklechitter fugues in triple-stops
as crow pepper in a disharmonic counterpoint of mad
calliope whose music drifts up from the faint distance.

Mornings like this might never come again or may of
their own accord. They are not for us to summon or
dismiss, but merely arrive to absolve and immerse.

A thousand poets try and a thousand poets fail. We
stand averse to surrender the collapse of this quickened
looking, our small white flags waving unseen on paper.

Joseph Gallo
July 19, 2010