Water lilies

Water lilies by Monet.

Cold and warm colors, mysterious floating. 
 

Oars

"Halt, muddy river! Rest awhile among your reeds.
Make way for a lover in a hurry,

for you haven't a bridge or a chain-ferry,
to take me across without oars."
 

(From Ovid's Amores - Book 3- translated by Guy Lee.)
 

This is as good a description as any of the sense of ‘crossing’ one experiences in the entanglement of new emotions.

Captivity

End of October in East York.

Sun rays slowly breaking through gray cupolas of off-white clouds lit up domes of secret Tiffany lamps in the trees covering the ceiling of light.

Red maple leafs descend unhurriedly, spiraling down towards the patchy front lawns.

Dark green yew leaves swaddle bungalow walls, crisscrossing still unsuspecting dogwood clusters.

Scraping off the scent of ash trees, poplar fumes and beech tree bark, yellow hues tinge off a webbed, glittering glance towards the colors held captive inside a day spent in East York.

A Matter of Breathing

"For every period of art , there is an intimate rhythm, as natural and instinctive for it as the rhythm of breathing can be."

From Julien Gracq's "Reading Writing" (En lisant en ecrivant) translated by Jeanine Herman.

Frieze

The poetry that I dream of , however, is quite different from Hamlet’s.

Mine is made up of muffled sounds and white friezes of dried flowers, rendered transparent by an Aegean light.

It’s harmony within shores that contain a sea of untamed senses.

(Here and there, a whiff of burnt incense.)

Skull

Poetry is held in balance by strange words and arrogant assonance.

Here is Hamlet – “where be his quiddits now, his quillets” he asks in the first scene of Act V.

Words that sound and feel like pebbles or small bones inside a skull.

Weight

The weight of poetry.

Feathers scattered on a beach, grains of wet sands held in balance by a small coin, in its turn burnished by dying sun rays, just before the evening sets in.

Shards of seashells, wisps of algae and mother of pearl grays.

A sunk sundial, if you will, pointing to the beginning of a receding sea.

The Netherworlds

This day had trapped me in its funnel of mists.

My eye lids are heavy, as if I had been swimming in a pond of visual metaphors, filled with Monet’s water-lilies – wisps of inverted colours, mauves sinking in a silt of grey moss, white dissolving within the boundaries of a porous horizon.

It reminds me of a river bed undercut by icy currents, basking in yet un-negotiated hues.

A cone of flowers and water, haunted by reflections of shapes on stilts, moves gently in a rippled echo.

Dawn is near.

Caught within the gorges of this fluidity, I find my own thoughts trickling downwards, through the funnel, into the netherworlds.