LAST CALL! Tonight is the big night at the Dayton Art Institute. Buses, minivans, maxivans, campers, trailers, hikers, hoofers, planes and trains will be converging on the DAI.
Why?
Why, because ... starting at 7 p.m. ... David Lee Garrison, of Wright State University ... and I ... will be sharing some of our poetry with those lucky people ... in a program that's free and open to the public.
Sorry, can't make it, you say? Not to worry, I have a poem for you ... especially for you ... right now ... here.
It's one of my favorite poems (don't let my other poems hear me saying that ... but it is). Like many of mine, it's built on memories ... and the memories seem to grow ... or take on a new glow, at least for me, each time I read it.
It's one of my rain/hills poems. As some of you may already know, I grew up in the hills ... my roots are still there, of course ... though, like a honeysuckle vine, the rest of me has rambled through several states on the way to where I am now.
But that's another story.
If you do make it to tonight's reading at the DAI, you're likely to hear this particular poem. But if you can't make it there, then here's this (silent) version for you ... now:
MORNING MIST
Invisible morning mist explores my face
like cotton candy melting at the touch,
reviving memories of that sweet softness
as droplets seek my eyes and slip inside
unseen. But there in the swirling distance,
there against the trees where it bivouacs,
ready to invade in ever growing numbers,
there against a sagging barn, there against
the dim, straining headlights of a silent,
bouncing car peering back at me, and here,
high above me in the drenched, dripping
leaves of a hickory giving what shelter
it can, the mist makes itself visible.
Such workings must be meant to conceal,
but what? The past which clings to me
like the smell of smoke? Or the future,
lost somewhere in the effervescing spell
that embraces these hills, their valleys?
Knowing mystical mist steals the vapors
of my breath and returns only a silence
that swarms about like tiny ghostly gnats
touching my ears and dancing on ahead,
ever ahead, seeming to point the way
I should take as I labor back up the hill.
©
2003(from my first collection, Chance of Rain, Finishing Line Press)
***
Today's word: gnats
2 comments:
I hope you had a wonderful time at the reading :)
The poem is lovely. It reminds me of a very late afternoon up in Maine. I was driving along the eastern mountains, alongside a river, and suddenly - there was a large cloud of dragonflies, their wings shimmering in the sunlight. I don't remember seeing dragonflies in clouds like gnats before - or since. Your poem offers me a new image of that magical mist of dragonflies...
One of my favorites! It's the kind I had to read aloud on the phone to a friend...along with the cleverly written Chosen Words.
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