Darkness Shifts
April 20 2009


It depends on the moon.

On clouds,
scudding, dense.
Or a tenuous lens
of gauze.

And the ground.
The reflection of snow
austere and cold.
Or a mess of leaves
rotting, sodden
— like a thick poultice
soaking-up the light.

At night, the spectrum is grey
to black —
all surface, texture,
colour banned.
Darkness shifts
from jet to smoke to mud
to grizzled, ashen, dust.
I see black cats
whisking, nuzzling,
circling crows
cawing, cunning.
And underneath
a small grey mouse
running
flees.

Where edges soften with distance,
in a world of degree
not difference.
Buildings overlap
stacked back-to-back,
through gun-metal, lead, and scuff.
And mountains soften
as they recede,
through ebony, ink, and smudge.
Looming up
against pitch-black sky.

Where the moon will rise,
extracting the world
dripping
from its silver bath.
An unerring whetstone,
that sharpens every edge
with light.



"midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last"

That fragment of a poem by D A Powell set me off on this piece.
His work is really quite fabulous: accessible; allusive; with an inspired ear for the sound of language, for unexpected rhyme and imaginative line breaks; and subversively free-form and playful. He's a far better poet than me. I think he leaves more space. I think he trusts the reader more; and by being allowed to do more of the work, the reader in turn gets more enjoyment of the poem. And his use of rhyme is very deft: it sneaks up on you; it seems natural, instead of shoe-horned in according to some formula; and there is an almost kinesthetic pleasure in speaking it, in the "mouth feel" of the words. So I urge you to go check out his work.
Unfortunately, unlike Powell, I find myself completely powerless to fully escape the tyranny of the sentence! Which makes for too much punctuation, too much hand-holding. Which, in turn, tends to make my effort feel constrained and prescriptive. Nevertheless, he is a good influence, and I'm sure significantly improved on what "Darkness Shifts" might have been./B