Sunday Poem

LANDSCAPE 

An immense precision is necessary, coming as it does,
amazed at the arrangement, between last light and field. 

The land accumulates, always curving, apart from itself
as if everything depended on its arrival, as if its contents 

were a cruel consequence, purposeful, crowding the sky.
No single pattern emerges, no sleight-of-hand topology,

undefined, escapes this field of gravity, this philosophy
of continuous time. All repercussions are immeasurable.

In this singularity, the human touch melts in acceleration,
an equation we maintain in history, in a future boldly 

composed as if it were really going to happen, as if one
last array might bring us all to see what we least expect.

DAYBREAK 

Begin full of mystery, joining of shade and light, the shape
of nothing in particular, at some point unformed, plainly

fluid, amorphous. Everything unites, at odds with itself,
opposite in flow, hard to combine, harder still to undo.

There is no thinking past its form, no scene less worthy
of the thought. The landscape, an extraction, emerges out

of itself, ambitious, embodying a frame that has no face.
No brutal fare cools the heart of this expression, no wise 

illusion of the moment divides its rising points of light.
The occasion is geometric, the far horizon a mongrel line

rapidly moving away. All reason fades, all angles vanish,
the daybreak annealing this timely marriage of convenience.

RENDEZVOUS 

Put into words, the nightfall finds itself translated, a meeting
of ripe perfumes, clouds awash, an attraction low in the west. 

What are we to know of this? That there is only one clear way
into the night, its confession a confident dream in us, its canopy

a burning storyline of gods and goddesses? We see the horizon
lingers, speaking in tongues, slowly releasing the sky. Yet, hard

as it is to imagine, the night patiently awaits us, perfectly at ease,
safely celestial. It anticipates us at the head of the last remaining

light, a dark metaphor of itself. Then we will find sleep, dreaming
of rare fictions, unearthing a vital currency of stars falling loose

from the hybrid sky. In the end, will we find this to be what is here
for us to wonder, what dark embrace we covet, identical as heaven? 

From Birds Flock Fish School (2013) by Ed Carson