Contrast: A Blessing

I.  He

He cannot bring himself out of his fields,
Real or imagined,
He sees anchored worlds
In shallow ponds.

On the edge of sleep,
He imagines the moonlight
Shifting into his wooden room
As the half shadow-spirit
Of gossamer coming to canopy
His pain of modern geometry,
Real or imagined.

If he does not walk the fields,
Or think and walk in distance,
He dreams of it.

He cannot help but
sigh when he watches
The first violet slabs of dawn
On the winter nimbus,
The distinct venation
In the blood-red oak leaf,
Or the silent rotation in the cold
Concept of stars.
He catalogues in mind’s ink
The revelation of the moth’s reflex
Drawing it nearer the candle’s flicker;
The song of summer frogs,
And the suspicion that woods
In spring, with all their stunning life,
Make up one sentient being.

Sometimes, to keep his head
From filling with strange noise,
He reminds himself that he,
Like everything else,
Is suspended in space.

He focuses on a piece
Of haphazard moss growing on
A bit of limestone on the verge of
The peach field:

If I were to bore a hole through
Even there far enough,
I would reach only space.

He appreciates the notion of gravity,
But the flesh at his shoulder blades murmurs
As the silent wings unravel within strained muscles.
II.  She

She enjoys the circumambience of cities,
People walking outside her rusted windows,
The dissonance of colliding voices,
Philosophies, contexts.

She wishes to capture the picture
Of the human being in all his visceral
And emotional complexity
With a brush’s stroke or the camera’s snap:

She walks the town at night,
Walks into places where melancholy
People strum guitars,
Drinks foreign teas:
Her hand hides the corners of her
Childlike grin.

She has nothing to hide:
She enjoys the modern geometry,
The sea of glass and metal,
The hiss of cars,
The buildings of wood and stone;
Her eyes will catch the moon as its
Light commingles with the citrine-flash
Urban glow.
 

III.

They are one in the same:

They want to be like one another, poised, placid stars,
With their own unique storms and fields of force,
Like lights pinned to a sphere of quartz,
Turned by love itself.

Will Wright