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A cortege of clouds’
shifting planes
reflected on a river,
the current’s weave deepens,
yet motionless
the dramatization of
a fern unfolding,
light illuminating the air
for a moment’s threshold,
when time, where we stand,
corresponds to the day
held firm,
derived from the elegance of
the equation
for what was once never here.
Copyright © 2016 by James Brasfield. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 10, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
Now cosmos in bloom and snow-in-summer
opening along the garden’s stone borders,
a moment toward a little good fortune,
water from the watering can,
to blossom, so natural, it seems, and still
the oldest blooms outside my door are flourishing
according to their seedtime.
They have lived as in trust
of tended ground, not of many seasons
as the lingering bud in late summer,
when leaves have reached their greenest,
when a chill enters the nights,
How time slowed when any thought
or apprehension of the next instant
vanished (no obligation, then or later),
how in that long moment, all at once,
yet without surprise, how what was close
was present in a sudden suspense,
as such things rarely exist
as they did then, each apart from all,
seen as it might be truly,
and gave way to a pleasure
that had long been missing,
to expleasure, as if I were akin
Radiant the delayed calmness,
—Do you feel it, I said. —Yes, you said,
of what only each can know,
kernel of radiance, the globo terrestre
of a water drop, not the passing adaptations
of canonical light, but seconds stilled—
our hearts beating through the moments—centuries
of the next tick of a watch relieved,
a world enough in time to imagine
Piero walk to work across cobblestones
toward a completion, his close attention
to sunlight passing through shadows