Call and Response


How simply it begins, the gaze turned
by native bewilderment or inborn acumen
from the kind adults at table, from the sapien
stream of talk, to color, shadow, form, and light,
the ever-present world of envoys and indicators:
The purple-blue-gray shadow cast by a bowl.
The ivory column with its mute, self-evident meaning.
A tracery of branches defining existence, definitely
in mid-air, as snow begins to hush a city.

Something dark, a creature, darting from
the woodland scruff at dusk, fast as a shade,
never to be known. The innermost whorl
of a shell, a house worn to core and washed
to shore, held in the hand, and now to keep.  
A dark red leaf encased in sudden ice,
so calmly become a cold, contented gleam.
The flock of geese who fly overhead as we lower
our north star into the earth, the whirr of their wings.

The oldest theater, the Ur theater of late
afternoon light streaming from under a sky
of lead-dark, low-lying clouds. The pale green
underside of leaves, the side that breathes
and forecasts a fast-arriving front, the front
itself larger than our region, itself drifted
away from continental Pangea,
The burst of cattail seeds airborne, blown,
flying towards uncertain germination.

And the tangled thickets into which we see
but partially, the unspoken-for patches.
And water surfaces rippling, shining ever
to an ever-elusive horizon; and, and, and;
the list is long, it is all the things of this world
in a call and response as old, as lovely as love,
tendering to us anciently and now,
this unforbidden fruit, this gratis how-to
for minds, for making, and for human being.

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance