Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

What Shadows
Needles of rain. Ground makes no moan.
Sigh of wind in the sycamore. What's passing.
Haw berries rusting the hawthorn trees.
Don't look back. Think Orpheus. Pillar of salt.
One breath, then another. Sweat of apprehension.
Still life with wind and breadcrulnbs.
But I keep wanting to turn around.
No whimsy in it, running the gamut
bright red. And as deadly, she said, as nightshade.
Still I went on. Looking at her lips.
Sea verge to cliff edge, no shaking off
what shadows me.
After seeing the rain-swollen torrent at Gurteen,
I dream I want to give myself over
to its foamy, stone-broken dissolution of salt.
What then? What's not possible?
Weather Artists
In a jagged patch of blue
Pontormo might caress
across the tank-top of an angel
(a wide-eyed beauty
staring challenge or invitation
from under the lemon-green
heavy legs of a dead Jesus)
morning light is shining.
It shatters to a pelting shower
clattering the flat roof
like the mad hand
of a bodhrdn banger, high
on the quick shifts of light,
the slant mercury-bright
shoots and stems of rain
cueing him. After it passes
silence seeps in, brimming
the garden: provisional
absolute and absolution
Leopardi came to terms with:
its inauguration of small voices
(robin tongue, raindropplink
through the sycamore
leaf to leaf, a sudden gush of wind
translating every syllable
into tree-speech)
till light breaks back,
coating grass with that
yellow the pleine air painters
patented, so when I look
out this eastern window
I see, suspended
from a fuchsia twig, three
tiny blown-glass globes of lighi
in which, if the twig shivers
in any exhalation of air or
I incline to left or right,
the spectrum stays visible
a glimmering instant, as for
C'ezanne on his riverbank,
so he saw, and kept going.