23 October 2016
The glass grey sea
appeared to disappear
long before reaching
the horizon, the sky having dropped
a curtain of gauze not far
off shore. I felt closeted
on the planet with the sky
that close. I felt
I was being slowly entombed
as I watched. No wind blew
everywhere, not even a breeze,
as I felt the closeting,
felt the entombing. The open
sea over the sea kept vanishing.
I turned, and made for the fields
behind me, unmown, weed-wild.
Above them hovered high the sky,
an opening to the universe.
The fields reflected this sense
of freedom in how the periwinkles
intertwined with buttercups
intertwined with cornflowers,
in a ground of variegated
grasses and cover. I crossed these
toward a road above which
two hawks floated, lazily.
‘Road-kill,’ I thought. The road,
more distant that I had estimated,
turned me back across the fields.
I did not walk as far as the sea,
still gauze-enclosed.
I trekked north thinking cold
would sooner dissipate the gauze
than the heat I would encounter south.
I was banking on rationality.
Yet weather fronts are not rational.
And I came to musing
so long as my mind
was free to think its own way,
I need not fear being
closeted, being entombed.
Philip Kuepper
(14 August 2016)
Tagged: Philip Kuepper, Poetry
