Poems

On Wings Yet Unbroken

Remember the market square acrobats spinning in air, and those masked naiads sashaying down the steep stair to a string quartet playing Handel’s Water Music?  How later we found the wing-broke swallow; so gently you nursed, soothed, and rushed to save him.

Remember the cloistered ghosts and striding the hills on jaunty rambles with Jasper and Pippa tugging toward crescendo canine sunsets that Gainsborough and Constable must have purloined while punting downstream?

And that pair of long-necked swans piercing the bow-eye bridge like feathered gods creating a perfect parabola to mirror the centuries foretold by bold Rannulf, good-luck herald on high… he raptured and kept ward on badger, bandersnatch, jubjub, and cracked mirrors.

And the loons… inveigling, bringing frisson to our honey-drenched gypsy wagon shimmering in tilted tremolo… of crickets, castanets and capering minuets behind the carved moonstones, so large that titans must have hauled them from Asgard (or perhaps Wales).

The musky dawns of scramble egg, dark roast, and Swedish kringle…  lounging, sated in the daybed nook glancing in rainy-day looks at bric-a-brac knick-knack books in inner dimensional dance interregnum fancies in a rising velvet trance:

Thrum-humming wisps, dulcet mists of lemonade in gallery lassitude… foraging squishy wood… forays to the witchy brush realms to scry and scheme among dragonfly, lotus, and palms to bare feet among wet grass and count glowworms in the rush.

Remembrance is so, so slippery on bare feet… acrobats spinning over market town, masked naiads gliding down a cascade of stairs, swallows and skylarks in lamentation over far field… in perfect equipoise in a last murmuration as if choreographed by Hermes (or perhaps Busby Berkeley) fluttering in wistful cortege to the revelers below on their last ghosting when frail, demiurgic creatures will rise once more on wings yet unbroken and race toward the falling sky.

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