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Round this morning, a dove's cry called Out through the leaves, into the cold air To a mate, on autumn's tide lost Sad and sorrowed, as all the deadened hearts About this world, the winds hath tossed. Drifted. I drifted. There were leaves in the air in autumn, snow in winter flecks of rose and flight in the spring, bright daubs of sunlight came with summer dancing through the mid-morning dew. And when the day was done, all gone to dark blue, I would sit on a dock in the river, and just watch the water rise and fall in satin ripples, catching the city's lights in long bright streaks, rising, falling, flickering like a flag in the wind, pushing a bottle behind me, into the rocks at shore making a tinkering sound, and the water when I stared at it, and thought of nothing else, moved toward me like an endless procession of starlit hills, gently rolling along, harboring the shimmering flecks of all this world's wandering souls. The simple perfect. Turtle clawed through grass half glossy shell, half wet feet, pawing, lifting and pushing, soft belly along soft dirt, wet from morning rain, drying with noon sun. Glow of drink sinking, as the sun upward creeps. Nymph at the pool's edge the waters curl flower shapes around your fluttering legs |
flies at the window apple forgotten on the sill. In April, The trees rise to be broken Come October with the winds When I am One in many on the train Heaving through the underground Where no roots Reach down. And only rock with water seeping Through their cracks. Cowering in the tunnel of a machine's lair, Under cover from cold. In this city The winds blow As pointed shapes to empty The summer littered streets. Only that there will be sweet water, from a gentle stream over smooth gray rocks and along green moss, with trees for cool shade, and rustic fields to look out over, at a cottage puffing smoke; white stucco on the walls, and (fresh) thatch on the roof. It would be pleasant to live there and cook fish from the stream, with tomatoes from the little garden outback, and hoe in the bright sun, brown, sandy soil with a white cat chasing butterflies, on green grass nearby. Mouse, Owl above gray fields in night's dark edge, the red barn is brown in this light like blood from yesterday's scabbed scratch, too tired to wash away. Just like mouse sometimes too tired to move. To run away to the underground, now, to ride in the cold, October sky. |
Fury ever went so flying. Fury ever came so formed. Fury never had sounded so like the humming drone that collects in the empty spaces binds, divines, drives the gentle flock to mad accession as when, as a child in a field at its edge with trees above and high before, casting late afternoon shadows into the grass and over my head, I tore the rotting shell of some long dead hulk beached and washed up upon the meadow's shore and wound like a paper unfolding to an atrocious spread, the fury of a citizenry disturbed, intruded. And as I ran, with the wasps behind I watched some close, some drop dead of exhaustion to graves in the grass. Eight found their furied mark and cast my young face to tears. The trees floated out over the river and I sat, precarious in their limbs staring down at the fish, who's tails beat the water with a swish, swish! Swish, swish! Jeff LeBlanc |