The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Grace Cavalieri AFTERLIGHT For Jan These are the eyes the world made, With language tracing outside of gravity, its Hurts wandering like tongues of lace. Yes there is divine fruit growing from the wound, Yes petals thread love like a vine bending The surface of our seasons, remarkable, broken. More than anything I'll think of laughter as The shapely flight, as the way humans pray for loss. More than most I will admire that sweet blue air. We can call this world a sphere animals walk as guests, Say this is a natural garden we fell into, out of, The bare mountains, the mist, the landscape. But on this pretty and perfect land a seed Came to fire, flaming the meaning of memory. What more is there in the law of love? MY FATHER'S FAITH My father's body was a simple letter Spelling Sundays with colors arriving And yet denying God's radiance. What Could open a calm within him? What could bless him? Attaching keys to spin him home? He thought his own hands were Enough for holding stars. Eternity and children also arrived to surprise his despair. Places since then welcomed him dying With black imaginings Filling the house like dark milk and browning pears. His arms were words lifting up the dead every five minutes Opening himself to glory, finally Or that must have been another person, Who knew the purpose of happiness, not my dear sad father. JUXTAPOSITION Wings down, the woodthrush Hits the window lost In the floating difference Of shadow and light, The yellow climb broken From the mouth of his Neck a broken mass, A river of death. It flew from the fine Flicker of trees through An Autumn epoch without dread, The special prize, a Pane of glass which professed Sky, graying solitude before it died, we held It, placed among the hard flowers. MINIATURES The child sits in her robes and crowns, through the tall winter. From the dollhouse here the cold room unravels the difference between real and toy. The world is gone with the miracle of fingers filled with tiny velvet. The closet keeps the silence of the room and all decorations below in the parlor⎯aunts, uncles⎯visitors⎯do not compare with the beauty of the small table of wood, its cup that holds one drop, the painted saucer. Where should the red aproned wife stand? She can move her wooden arms. This is a carved chiseled mother, in a domain of paint. In this province that is morning, there is not yet school, a road, a self for the child. Hope cannot fly away from a cabin of sturdy dolls in their two-inch rooms.There is blue outside everywhere, but in the blind hall, painted eyes are open. Dolls sit in a place beyond the procession of ordinary mortality, even beyond. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |