Night Falls Darkness Rises

Maureen Scott Harris. Drowning Lessons

distance stands up around me

It is a perhaps puzzling assertion until one makes the experiment oneself. Looking down at one's toes, sensing the short distance, slowly raising one's head to peer above the tree tops and the roof lines into the sky: distance rises... and it is the precision of this language that makes one stop and consider

Birch trees — thin spirits — glimmer
and dissolve as darkness rises from the ground
stretching in its turn till it stands and fills the sky.

One trusts the poet. The description is apt. Shadows gather in the underbrush while the light continues to play overhead. Darkness rises.

It is because of such precision that one trusts the poet and becomes open to the observations captured in the ghazals: "We forget some things, lose some, throw some away". Memory and the passage of time is like a landscape where darkness rises and distance stands up.

And so for day 1062
09.11.2009