Moonfrost
There's a place
in butterfly dusk
where moonfrost drifts in sepia crystals,
where nightbirds' wings fold
so that even flight
cannot beat its way out
of the stillness of giants.
It's the place
where you stand
in the twilight of trees, where the heart
still stalks the thing
that thinks shadows hide it
but shows in the dark,
bright as a moon that
glows like a cygnet
asleep on a midnight lake.
~March 2018
posted for Kerry's FLASH
at real toads
Some mood music...
Image:Crepuscule, 1897, by Heinrich Kuhn
Aw Hedge, so perfectly etched, fin-de-siecle steampunk in a post-Stevens ur-snowman age. It's a vision only you carve to perfection, and this reader can't tell whether its Eurydice or Orpheus who is looking forward or back. (Or cares.) A halcyon stillness "beyond all winters," as Rilke would say. Every time you shake that snow-globe the vista is fresh and cyanotic and invigorating. Great to see ya here at the Pond and uncorsetted from 55s.
ReplyDeleteHey, what a wonderful treat to find my BFF writing on a Sunday! I honestly don't think I've read a finer simile than the one which closes this poem. It's funny, things seem so clear to us when we're young: what we'll do and what we won't, how we feel about this thing or that...only to find when we're older that most things are ultimately elusive and ambivalent. What endures, it seems to me, is mostly within ourselves, not in the outer world, and though it endures, it refines itself down to an essence. Can we speak of it at all, by then? Well...you just have, and eloquently.
ReplyDeleteOooh! I especially love the final image - the moon as a cygnet on the lake, but the atmosphere you have created is closely felt throughout, a little ominous, a little melancholy but altogether memorable, a place we have all visited at one time or another.
ReplyDeleteYou write as if you had seen a night in Scandinavia... there is a midnight twilight in your words that talks to me... love it, and feel like I'm walking on soft moss in a very old forest.
ReplyDeleteI love the butterfly dusk and the moonfrost. But then I love the whole thing. Perfection!
ReplyDeletethe whole, but especially the 5th and 6th lines of the first stanza.
ReplyDeletethat we are in the twilight of trees has been unfolding in tree-time - since the advent of power saws, perhaps.
and that thing hiding in shadows, be it love or some brighter bauble - it may not shine bright as the metaphor of your final verse. ~
Perfect pure and serene Hedge.
ReplyDeleteI have been in this still place, where flight is elusive and maybe not even wanted, where the heart soothes for the lost, in shadows that loom as the day closes, lit by the moon, and all else unremembered.
And I like being there.
Anna :o]
I read this several times...
ReplyDeleteThe first read spoke of a sense of calm, then the calm felt scary--as if it is the calm embraced by the hunter before the kill, or felt by the prey before the hunter spill its blood. At first, I thought, How I love this kind of tranquility. But the last two stanzas spooked me, as if the speaker is looking at the back of my neck... and although I can't see his face, I can feel that I won't quite like the smirk on his face.
I love a poem that leaves me half creeped out, half fascinated.
This has such an ethereal quality, and weirdly reminded of the book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon with the cold voiced reminded here something was watching her in the woods. Its always watching, but never completely hidden. Great writing!!
ReplyDelete