Scherzo
Cloudlet of rock stained green,
Child brought you home from the beach
And lodged you in the varnished shelf.
Exiled from things marine,
Beyond the surf’s vociferous reach,
You are a shard of stillness,
Wildness taking stock of itself.
And yet you are an inland sea,
And shape as well of rock-roofed sky.
When some symplegadic clash
Broke you off, it set you free,
Flinging ashore a forgery
Of luminous depth that magnets the eye
Until it is awash
Against calligraphy and code of stone
Clotted by cloud-like mimicry
Above a sun-stained horizon.
The sea translates the sky
Into a language of water --
That much is the known fact.
But that rock can flow and fly
Is quite another matter.
What magical act
Bent the stonescape Rorschach,
Making the sky kiss the sea,
Colliding each onto each, arc to arc,
And from the wounded center-mark
Unfolded a symmetry?
Clearly it is no crime
For sky to pose as rock, or for cloud
To dissemble up-flung foam.
To deceive is, equally, to conceive,
To confirm that nothing is endowed
With origin—not even Time,
That exiled wave that presently
Seeks a futile home
In some shoreless futurity,
Unless by our leave
It returns to where it ought to be:
In the forms and colors that resemble, multiply,
Under a probable sky,
Their ceaseless fictions of eternity.
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| Driftwood by Melissa Nolledo ⓒMiMiNolledoPhotography |