Emily, It Is Getting Late

[for Mary Adalyn Young-Douglas]

Emily, it is getting late:

the blaze on the trees and

the blaze on the  poems are one;

the snow clouds tick the towns away

and I am on my own to stare

at the wall that  readily turns to stars.

I know that you would understand

the quatrains of this early moon

the open question of the wind

the quotidian you somehow find
an open window through which shines
so close at hand your own Sublime

and then I hear from distant years
a background music suitable to you

it's something from Charles Ives*

that moves

over the same bent fields...

while in a golden age we think

we may have many years to see

but the maple’ s  ensign warns us

you are nearer than

these  silver riddles fluttering from your hands

we still can read:

inscribed with their own answers

as God’s may be -  I'd like to think

He’s  pouring over them again

tipping back His amethyst chair

as any fond Father would

but in my sleep

an unnamed orb  keeps bleeding ivory words

and disappearing

as it did, (I think) so many times for you-

the lamp’s unlit…

and it’s nothing’s  set upon the household candlestick now:

vivid for a nation or a world within a world;

within each  secret’s  secret self

to counter  the miniature glorias set in pearl

you well remember as flame-

since it was just you  singing, singeing them...

I can’t dispel  the sense of something blamed  or

someone radiant lingering here

with somewhat more to say on these lost subjects…

I stand stock -still by the mossy door

where Beauty’s shadow seems to veer

and wonder only to myself

just who in the glittering days ahead

will comprehend

as if by  heart-

as if they wrote the words themselves-

the least hue in your brightening palm

the gleaming instant caught out in surmise:

I seem to clasp,

so briefly, meadow-sweet-

and vastly-then, as now-

before the first

or the last snows of Poetry itself-

mary angela douglas 9-10 october 2011

*reference to Charles Ives ( American New England composer) musical composition: “The Unanswered Question” which he refused to identify.