Quarry Walk

You have walked the ancient quarry all morning,
gray and still, not a ripple on the water,
the soft reflections like a watercolor,
soft and suggestive, not quite real,

like your vision, that sees what is not there,
what perhaps, never was there; sees
color dancing in imaginary wind, sees
love where there was only convenience, sees
less in delusion than dreams.

You shout, and the echo hangs in the air like a ghost.
Birds fly from their nooks, disturbed in their invisibility,
by a fear imagined by generations of conditioning
that have nothing to do with now, except that

memories have power. Power
to raise the dead and cause them to haunt,
or dance, or die in a wisp of wind,
cold against your cheek.

It is time to leave, to go home,
to find warmth and wrap yourself in it,
to banish the ghosts in scripture and bourbon,
in the soft touch of true love

that does not understand your long walks
into the dark hollows and grey stones,
who cannot understand your black canyons, blinded
by their own wilderness,

a beautiful blindness, not unlike your own,
able to see only your perfect,
broken
beauty.

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The picture is of the quarry that surrounds my house here West Pawlet, Vermont. It was taken just last week after a dusting of snow rendered the whole countryside into a living post card. You can click on it if you would like to see a larger version.

Regular readers will note the new “listen” button at the bottom of today’s poem. I tried this a while back and got lazy, but I am trying it again, perhaps not on every poem, but on ones that are longer, or where the sounds are as integral a part of the poem as the words and images. It will connect you to a WAV file where you can hear me read the poem.

Have a blessed weekend my friends. Here in Vermont the weekend is beginning in fog.

Tom