Friday, February 03, 2012

This place of quick forgetting

Photobucket

Netherponding


1
That small lake in Holland still holds her
three trees along the bank. Ordinary lake,
pond really, nothing remarkable, nothing
to recollect why it matters all these years
later. A scattering of ducks where the canal
glazes in from the north, a single bird braving
the middle waters, one paddled foot after
the other, until the dark vectors of its passing
disrupts the diffused light a reluctant sun placed
there rising to flatten out into long v’s of flight.
The halt old man, the hasty lovers, the tardy maid
who might have angled through the fields to pass
this place of quick forgetting, the deafening
calls of dawn or dusk pressing duty to the
hurried feet, life an impatient visitor in need
of tending to at all costs, even this one.

Photobucket

2
The moving of a single chair changes the room,
releases the house from within itself, turns the
world toward a point of direction it has never
known along an arc that trails off into what has
yet to be. Clean the window glass and a star
settles the sill. The door ajar is neither open,
nor shut, allows neither light nor shadow to
enter or leave. Halls hold posture, offer fleet
transition to all who would seek such promises
of it. The rug untrod stays to its purpose, cares
nothing for the foot that has not traversed, or
for those that will. Shelves settle deep into
themselves, hold all we might need before we
ever know the ache of such reckless needing.

In these things come what it is to live for such loss.

Joseph Gallo
January 8, 2012


Photobucket

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown parried...

Excellent, Joseph. You've made the landscape spiritual here, and I believe it implicitly. Part 2 especially is elegiac.

February 07, 2012 11:19 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home