Every once in a while the branches part
and there is a gleaming splinter of light–
just enough to nick the rough bark, make it seem
like the scritch of a match head had birthed
its copper sides and these rich, fluttering
halos of green. Hard to court abundance,
hard to keep it— And yet, here is a feather
left behind by the crested bird, the silken pods
from the honey locusts, vermillion threads
pulled from the frayed tapestry: what surged
like ripeness once, continues to show its face—
shy homeless waif, knocking again on your door.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Always a Story
- Landscape with Sudden Rain, Wet Blooms, and a Van Eyck Painting
- Letter to Implacable Things
- Landscape, with Cave and Lovers
- Miniatures
- Letter to Self, Somewhere Other than Here
- Ghazal with a Few Variations
- Letter to Silence
- Landscape, with Returning Things
- Postcard to Grey
- Not Yet There
- Letter to the Street Where I Grew Up (City Camp Alley, Baguio City)
- Between
- Parable of Sound
- Letter to Providence
- Glint
- The Beloved Asks
- Letter to Longing
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Twenty Questions
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Interlude
- Villanelle of the Red Maple
- Letter to Leaving or Staying
- Salutation
- Letter to Love
- Letter to Fortune
- Territories
- Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
- Dear season of hesitant but clearing light,
- [poem temporarily removed by author]
- Singing Bowl
- [temporarily removed by author]
- Risen
- Refrain
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Dear heart, I take up my tasks again:
- Gypsy Heart
- [poem temporarily hidden by author]
- Risk
- Vocalise
- Tremolo
- Interior Landscape, with Roman Shades and Lovers
- Bird Looking One Way, Then Another
- Like the Warbler
- Landscape with Carillon
- Letter to Ardor
- Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn
- Marks
- Landscape, with Sunlight and Bits of Clay
- Slaying the Beast
- Measures
- In a Hotel Lobby, near Midnight
- Landscape with Shades of Red
- Between the Acts
- Letter to Duty
- Letter to Nostalgia
- You
- Song of Work
- Balm
- Landscape, with Wind and Tulip Tree
- From the Leaves of the Night Notebook
- Letter to What Must be Borne
- Redolence
- Letter to Myself, Reading a Letter
- Night-leaf Tarot
- Trauermantel
- Foretelling
- Aubade, with Sparrow
- Reverie
- Mineral Song
- Layers
- Prayer
- Proof
- Landscape as Elegy for the Unspent
Hard to court abundance, /hard to keep it— . . .what surged/
like ripeness once, continues to show its face—/ shy homeless waif, knocking again on your door.
BEWARE, MY FOOLISH HEART…
When you gave up on dreams we gathered
like hoarded heartaches haplessly heaped
in darkened rooms we have long abandoned,
we stitched close a gaping wound of hurts
hurled helter skelter in a frenzy of fearsome
faithlessness we found were a fool’s scimitar.
O, corazon triste! O, corazon de Gitana!
A sad, miserable heart is a gypsy heart!
Beware this desolate heart, when it is hard
to find and hard to keep: when it surges, as
it must defiantly burst into a pulsing geyser
of desire, it will not spare the idle, hardened
heart. Surging like the ripeness it once was,
it continues to show its face—a scrawny waif,
shy and homeless, incessantly knocking,
insistently rapping at your bolted door.
You leave it ajar, and it creeps in like the fog
that chilled your heart once, it lingers, it chokes
your still smarting heart with a frisson
of a joie d’couer.You take him in for the night
and in the coldness of a morning after, phantom
that it was, leaps out of your window, and leaves.
—Albert B. Casuga
05-04-11