Photographer Stephen Locke, whose gorgeous photograph taken last Saturday, and I have started a project combining his photograph with my poetry, which we hope will lead toward a beautiful book. Here is a poem I wrote this week, inspired by this photograph. Follow Stephen on facebook, twitter and vimeo.
Enraptured
They said this would come: a lifting up, an ending to begin
what comes next, but only for the chosen at the precise moment.
Instead and always, this is what came: light falling open at its core,
the fire in the breath, the blue-black horizon of the next storm,
the billowing out of memory, and the scent of rain to come,
lost chances, and the inverse ocean we call the sky. All of this aligned
with wind and grass, all of life opening its hand to let us see
there is no place better than the crescent of light and weather
bending around the earth, no air sweeter than what shows us how fast
our hearts can beat, how high the thunderheads can power, how wide
the rush of grass and leaf can point. There is this ending, this beginning,
this falling and rising as we pound down the old cement stairs
to wait in the basement, or open back out the screen door to see
the reborn blue, the dance of what glows and darkens, the return
that cannot be reduced to a billboard proclamation, the last ember
on the horizon and the first star, then the second. Look up. Look down.
The world is enraptured, and the world is where we live.
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