a little sun as the clouds part

Posted on by theresakishkan

first roses

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

And so you pick roses–Madame Alfred Carriere, the tiny dog roses, Blanc Double de Coubert. On the table, they catch the light you have waited for all day, a little sun as the clouds part.

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –

You’ve begun swimming in the lake again, though it’s cold, 8 degrees, or 12, when you drive down to the shore. You don’t feel your feet. (The Feet, mechanical, go round –) But the water is green, the trees hang over it, the cedars, some alders, hard-hack with its grey-green leaves, and the swimming fills you with something like joy. Twice last week you swam in the pool but you gave up your card and every day since, you’ve waited for this moment, a little sun as the clouds part.

Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
 
Sometimes you feel you could swim the circumference of the lake, clockwise, counterclockwise, following the low clouds, the rain. The water is cold. Wild roses are coming into bloom. You don’t want to leave.
 
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
 
 
When you come home, wrapped in a towel, you open the greenhouse door. And there is movement, the frog who lives in a tub of water, among corkscrew rush and yellow flag irises that remind you of the field in Ireland where you lived in a caravan for a month, waking in the night to movement — cattle rubbing their backs on the corners of the vessel set on cinderblocks at the edge of the sea. For just a moment there is a little sun as the clouds part.
 
shadow
 
Note: the lines of poetry are (of course) from Emily Dickinson.

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Published by theresakishkan

I'm a writer living in paradise.

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