My poetry archive: IPBC - Fall day in the park

In August 2007, another poem received an honorable mention on IPBC. Of this poem I remember that, after a string of rather dour poems, it came to me in Quaker meeting that I should make this one a poem of celebration. Writing it felt like a victory.

Fall day in the park

In the lapidary light
of the sea, I am a flatfish
prostrate on the floor
of a cathedral, the eyes
on my back attuned
to the coruscation
of corals, polyps, bryozoa
swaying in the current’s sunlit blue.

Now on dancing eddies
I levitate in celebration,
vault and sweep and skew,
pitch and bank and camber
a hymn to overarching glory.
Then I sink again, canting
like a falling leaf, and rest

in the mud, where one day soon
my center eye will contemplate
the bare ruined reef while the other,
the wandering one, keeps watch
for the green ghosts hovering
amid the welter of weeds.