Saturday
and in the dark of the afternoon room I fell asleep while the little one paged through the photographs slipped into their sleeves in her book,
and the pictures began to speak:
there were messages caught there, when the captured light made ink made image did its first alchemy,
whole speaking lives that were no more:
she once lived by the sea, there was a desert inland that had a street named after him,
or if not a whole street, then his name was written there in the road beneath the road beneath the road:
on the hill, a dragon’s outline, made from the red dirt of that region by the people who have long since disappeared,
though they whisper beside us, behind us at the cinema, or while we drowse
in darkened rooms, in April, a curtain veiling the sun blazing,
and the trees hold their handsful of blossom
and the tulips cut and stems bending, still, in an envelope of water.
I am always so happy with your nature imagery. In particular that last image of the cut tulips on bending stems is so potent.
I’m also very taken with the notion of a “dragon’s outline.” That’s incredible, that is.
The setup of this poem works so beautifully for me–the pictures, the sleeping, the sensing of things past and speaking.
I love this.
I love the sleepy peace of this and the sound of pages of a picture album turned and lovely lines like “there in the road beneath the road beneath the road” – this speaks of what I love about old photographs of disappeared people.