Negotiating the Distance Between Memories
that my song might grow with the waters
-Neruda
An illusion flashes, true false false true,
a circular play of shimmering mystery
a naked ash. A double-bit axe.
Here in the heart an idea falls outside us.
It leaps, shaken loose by the wind,
the legendary silence of a bowl of pears,
Lingering in solemn light.
It might have been the pendulum
sweeping its life across, each tick
aligning with each tock. Or simply the sun
wavering in the eye of a heliotropic plant.
What the heart heard while the train waited:
whale and other irreducible designs
in heated debate elsewhere on the horizon.
Foxes flicker like an iron-willed despot
not content with three lumps of sugar at tea.
The red moon hemorrhages.
Now then, suture upon suture,
please accept this luxury.
These small grafts of wisteria.
Acknowledge, if you can, the streets
where colorless animals beg for patrons.
Where fistfuls of light cling to orange trees,
and oleanders refuse to bloom.
Note how the walls absorb, listening
to each contrapuntal movement the curtains make,
intent on the cat’s tail, rhythmic as a baton,
the clear moon deafened by space,
a romance, a nebula of stars pulsing
like tubas. The fanciful whirlwinds
of dust drumming jazz. All silent
performers, mimes for the suppression of time.
Your letter offered no reason why
we could not go on this way
meeting in a town each week
a different bar or why
after all these years awake
we dream apart.
One from each world
made in the language of music.
Making the song a cry
under the skin to be heard
reimagined and released into nightair.
From the moment of this word you are
the familiar light of what might be
what might have been.
The bough bends
a human arm sweeps out
and a century grows forgetful
or yearns towards the same
white on black pastiche
fixed on a cloud-filled eye.
One from silence measuring a circle
beginning anywhere
another ending nowhere near
the clearing sky your memento.
There is little wind in the pecans tonight,
little snow left on the ground.
How can this be? The wind and the snow,
ancient compatriots, and an idle sun
mindless of comparisons, march forward
warily. An oxblood hand reaches out
to console their windless faith.
Richard Weaver volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, CityLit, the Baltimore Book Festival, and is the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Recent publications are FRIGG, Mad Swirl, SPANK the CARP, Adelaide, Dead Mule, and Magnolia Review. He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende, 1992), and, on occasion, admits to being one of the founders of the Black Warrior Review, and once upon a time its poetry editor. His first ever publication was in the April 1975 issue of Poetry.