Surreal Landscape x

I wrote the first draft of this poem twenty years ago, give or take a few months. Although I have sent it out many times, it never seems to have caught an editor’s attention. So, time to let it fly on its own here. Perhaps you will see some grace in it, or perhaps you will think the editors who rejected it correct in doing so. Either way, it now has its public home…

Landscape

It’s a hastily made bed, not quite flat,
smooth, betraying a few small ripples:
glacial dump and curving river cuts that
punctuate lives while spheres—blue crystal—
harmonize desire’s cumulus curtains.
Golden legs brazenly stretch across
the quilted-bedspread pattern that’s certain
of its course, not contemplating loss.

The clouds grow in portent, rise with moisture.
Storms fly like a prophetic raven flock;
from them a striving white-water river
cuts all the way down into the bedrock.
Steering my mind over these rapids—in
a deep eddy I slip over, begin.

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