Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn

This entry is part 50 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

 

If this is the middle, how long does it last? Once only, I may have come close; but I was never that girl who might have lain in her two-piece suit across the bed of a truck or on a beach under an overhang of rock, saying Let’s give them something to talk about, baby. Forever the wallflower then, even in math class: moving the popular girl with skin like almond cream to stride past in study hour and yank in disgust the extra pencil I’d tucked behind my ear. That calculus is over. This rain at dawn, though: in the half-light, how it makes the green more vivid, how the faltering songs of wood-thrushes chime like timepieces from another world. The flare is brighter still from pent-up longing. The world hasn’t gone away; its roots push deeper. The wind on my tongue tastes like salt from the sea; this late in life I want to roll up the cuffs of my jeans and walk without stopping along its wavering edge.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

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3 Replies to “Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn”

  1. A CIRCLE’S SHADOW
    (After Landscape, with Salt and Rain at Dawn)

    It the sea eats limbs of love, so love, so life, may not
    to its eternal wanting finish what it late started must
    soon deny: a clown’s journey through a circle’s

    shadow, the circle rending rapture, where, threatening,
    the Shadow begins what beginnings should have done:
    to fill the empty cups, the gaping tables, with lilies

    of the marsh, and vases of the Sun. But the circle
    and the shadow uniting are miracles come the Sea,
    its womb and lilies devouring. Perhaps you are right.

    Desire’s pent-up longing is brighter still, stinging still,
    and will never, ever go away, like the homing waves
    that take us back, take all things back, to a beginning.

    —Albert B. Casuga
    05-08-11

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