Daniel James Sundahl
epiphania
Praise the world to the Angel, not what's unsayable.
You can't impress him with lofty emotions; in the cosmos
that shapes his feelings; you're a mere novice. Therefore show him
some simple object, formed from generation to generation
until it's truly our own.
--Rilke, from "The Ninth Elegy"
Looking westward through the porch screen,
White light from the full moon shivers
On snow crust, on a glaze over fields.
The silvered-seconds, the whited minutes,
The wind-chimes euphony, the wavy-warped drifts,
The attempt to capture that luring call in the rising moon
Only to be jostled back beyond repeal....
*
Maybe it is simply like tipping the head back,
Eyes rising, tracing the pale-pearl flush over head,
Untouched, skeletal, almost fibrous in its network
Across the sky of dark-blue drape, a mysterious beauty
That promises what with grace we must become:
Marginal angels, immortal transients, fresh tracing
Of that lost beginning grafted to the sweetest words.
Easter Morning, Luna Pier,
Two Men Fishing In A Boat
And over them a gray calm,
Fog folded fatly over the water,
A hundred yards or so of visibility.
Their bait stalks along the bottom,
Gracefully misbegotten.
Strange how the mind
On a morning like this
Looks for tone and terminology,
A sad attempt to understand God’s
Timelessness giving forth Time.
Someone at the pier’s edge faces east,
Listening to the water
Slopping the stones below;
An alien conscience or another
Phantom of loss and gain.
On the boat, a match spurts;
A finger held too near the flame
Brings that old curse of pain
Cleaving the fog-bound air,
Patience hardened to a pittance.
In the hover of a white bird,
The light begins to shape and feather.
A respite from fear some poet might think.
But the wait’s begun again, the water
Rounding the stones in penitence.
Prime Mover
Years pass, and I remember still
A girl with one leg draped over a balcony rail.
I think of how it has been;
I think of how it will go on:
Steadfast evening skies,
Spacious the first evening star
Riding radiant and pure,
The flame points alternating,
A part of infinitesimal Time
Taking the shape of all I know:
A voicelessness, a leg draped, a name mouthed,
An old woman sweeping her stretch of sidewalk . . . .
