Photo by Alex Hockett on Unsplash
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
—“Sunday Morning”
1.
Oracular the filtered light of oak
through her peignoir She comes to me as though
her spell was never broken I’m still twenty
I can smell those pungent oranges in the sun
Did I get lost? Did I forget? Her music
is a river long gone underground The lady dreams me
as a girl seated in an oak enraptured
by the “chaos of the sun”
2.
Did I forget? Did I get lost in “the dark
encroachment of that old catastrophe?”
The river flows from forest into cave
Listen “the ancient hush of holy sacrifice”
There was a shattering The old gods severed
by stroke of axe The shadows brood
about the gone the lost The waters
wander on into the “chaos of the sun”
3.
Sun and drops of rain after a long drought
The lady speaks for birds and for the alphabet
of trees Remember one midsummer a door
opened? You found yourself with me
beneath the hazel tree? Nine branches
each one a muse We gathered seeds
to feed the salmon Your thoughts were wings
amidst “the chaos of the sun”
4.
Seated in the same old chair that held me
when first I met my lady’s gaze
Did I get lost? Did I forget? Her musings
are my own “green wings” What use the smell
of oranges the memory of oak invoked peignoir
when years wheel to the thirteenth tree the elder
the tree of death? How does a poet of the old enchantment
sing us through this shattering
into the “chaos of the sun”?
Naomi Lowinsky's poems have been widely published, most recently in Serving House Journal, Ginosko and Stickman. Her poem “Madelyn Dunham, Passing On” won first prize in the Obama Millennium Contest. She has also won the Blue Light Poetry Chapbook Contest.
