Blogger's Silent Poetry Reading
Messengers Falling to Our Aid
Sometimes everything dazzles—broken glass
on the river bank, rain dimpling the sand.
But aren't there days you'd gladly slip like a dime
through the silver slats of the boardwalk
and dissolve in the pastel froth the tide swirls?
That's why, when noonlight suddenly obliterates
the surface of every leaf, we need a voice to linger
in our minds, whispering let go, or go on,
need lip-shaped window smudges where something
invisible has kissed us. Wind turning our clothes
inside out, coffee making a stranger's breath familiar—
clearly, not all messengers pour out vials
of destruction or braid glass chips into a saint's
leather belt. Some must be sent to teeter
on the edge of a smoke-filled room, watching
color spatter as the wheel revolves and light
plucks the fine grooves of a guitar's steel strings.
Were they supposed to tell us something?
It's all mixed up now with the singer's breath
deep in the mike, her lowered head,
hair falling over a half-whispered rasp,
collapse of ice cubes in an untouched glass,
a match scrape's millisecond of nothing,
and then—the blue birth of flame.
Betsy Sholl
from
Late Psalm
February 2, 2007 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | Print