Brought

The still of quiet noon has passed and now a breeze rises to rustle the leaves. Where they stir, light plays with shade. Under the trees there is flickering, as though watching an old movie, but in memory not on a screen, and full of green, not black and white. Images are conjured and fleet by; streets, rooms, houses, faces, gestures: the panoply of years, all silent, as insubstantial and insistent as the light.

A woodpecker is hammering a nearby tree, a sound like a loud clock that is ticking far too fast, but today not even this urgency can hasten time, which creeps like the lines of shadow, barely perceptible. It is the past that rushes, while the present remains placid. Still, but brushed with distance brought by air, imagining movement slow like a swimmer's deep underwater, I am transfixed by the day full of days.


( Sunday Verse )