Goodbye, the light

The sunshine of poetry casts shadows 
                             - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Perhaps it is quiet in the pine woods. All the trees are misted with the day’s last light. A small, dark bug turns on the lip of a green leaf where tiny white flowers are growing out of a damp log.

Maybe as you stop at a rock by the water to watch the sun set, the evening breeze carries an aromatic elixir of pine needle, waterfall, and mossy trunk. The horizon holds open the landscape to an enveloping cloud of darkness, the precise shape and contour of the granite boulder that you are sitting on. 

Vanishing Point (with Tess P)

Perhaps you are a bird pulling out your tail feathers, passing each day making light, opening spaces; cleaning closets, painting the air, the walls the color of the center of the sun –white, white –as if you could chase suffering from your planet; and there, at the vanishing point, you see them, holier than anything these elephants in the summer haze.

Maybe in reverse perspective, your line of vision diverges against the horizon. Such a wide vista provides the elephants the necessary space to recede from your sight. Only then, as white fades to black, are you able to stand far enough outside yourself to notice a pair of singing birds with moons in their feathers perched at the edge of a leafy branch or, as seen under a microscope, nesting deep within the bright room of your heart.

Translation, a reading (with sunbeams)

Chalk (with Tess P)

Perhaps as you were falling asleep, the image arose in your mind of white path meeting white path. Upon the paths was a webworth of deer tracks that ran to the shores of the land gleaming gold with the day’s last light.

Maybe like a fish you suddenly shatter the water, leaping toward the dazzling golden light. Then return, meeting your shadow, sealing the wetness of your world as if a black table cloth were thrown across the lake; and as you drift in the dark, you can still see flecks of light and small creatures with wings that dart at the water's edge.

Translation (with Tania P)

Perhaps translation can be likened to traversing the Grand Canyon by mule-back instead of on foot, gauging how far the gut of the hooved can permissibly swing over trail's edge and back while keeping its rider.

And maybe translation is a way to think in a way we never dreamed we could think as we travel to a place not easily reached in a climate which forces solitude even on its atmosphere. Upon reaching our destination we find ourselves engulfed in a landscape rich and various because its messages can be received; personal prayers that invite us to travel further across a ravine through the city that surrounds us and down to a tiny town in the palm of our hand that our children call home.