| This Place Wind lies not soft and easy on the earth but heavy like dusk. I am watching it as it moves low and steady, crossing the entire length of the field. Before it, a gray mist silently glides against the tall grass and the almost indistinguishable earth. The blades sway, nudged and prodded, at the whim of the slightest breeze or heartbeat before it shifts suddenly. I lean close. Yes, I say. It is a whisper— a gasp of exhaustion panted into the soft flesh of the earth— made even more tender by dew and the remnants of last night’s drizzle. I swallow a tightness that comes up suddenly into my mouth. As much as I fight it, I force myself to turn— to walk with my back to this wind despite the fact that it makes me feel clean and exultantly pure in a way I never have before. |
| This one perfect moment A whorl of blue and rust turns slowly to an existence so subtle we might not even notice it. The fiery glory jaundices the arch of the sky, hidden from us by knotty birch trunks and grasping fingers of branches. A steady sigh is going on someplace nearer than we thought or imagined. It hovers there— the voice of what surrounds us. All we hear— in this one perfect moment— is its steady, unrelenting yesssss! |
| Another Day How is it that we have come even this far? Remember another day when you were so full of anguish you could not even see beyond the parameter of that afternoon? Now the world, though no kinder, is less angry (or so you believe) and even less intent on that harm you imagined it so full of that almost forgotten day. The season moves in the wind and leaves you standing with its exhausted hope lying at your feet. The day is over, it seems to say, and so too the fevered frustrations of that strange youth, only slightly misspent. |
| We Wait “The meaning is in the waiting.” —R.S. Thomas The shadows are roaming through the trees. They are passing, back and forth, between that distant place and this nearer comfort. They move before us, all the way to the other side and back. Wherever the sun goes, they go too. We wait for them to glide over the entire length of the earth on which we sit before we get up and move, leaving behind these lengthening impressions like a distant—yet still pulsing—daydream. |
| For so long The afternoon is dying faster than we expect. The shadows turn pale blue between the trees. I see swirling curlicues of rain and mist moving in the low brush. Fingers of grass and leaves grasp each other, kneading the tired mud beneath them like a well-worked clay. Something similar to obsession runs wild upon this earth I find so comforting and yet so sad. A late season loneliness strays—just beyond my vision, in the darkness that gathers thick and persistent in the farthest copse. We can only just barely make it out—the loneliness we have dreaded all our long lives. It is waiting for us, as the almost- forgotten face of someone we have longed to see for so long. |
| Almost There The lake reflects the wrong scenery. We reach out for it, almost as we would a star or a low-lying cloud. We’re half-way there. There— where violets bloom all through the day. We’re almost there— where the oak’s own branches reach forward to touch its reflection just as we might touch our own. |
| Red Tree a gift from Gin For over a month, fire has raged on the otherwise bare white wall— a single red flame like the sanctuary light before the symbol-festooned aumbry that heralds the sacred Presence. All this time it glows there— red as a heart and just as big. It pulsed there— thudding steadily against the wall the way a well-wound clock does. It shimmers and sways as though caught in some perpetual autumn backdraft. For over a month, fire has burned on my wall without consuming it. It leaves no ash, no ghost of itself in an exhausting exhale of gray smoke. It burns simply, fueled by its own bursting forth. |
| In May, 2006, painter Gin Templeton and poet Jamie Parsley shared a multi-media showing of Gin's paintings and Jamie's poems at the Spirit Room in Fargo. The product of this collaboration is the book, Winter's Edge--a collection of Gin's paintings and Jamie's poems. A sampling of the poems are included here: |
| Poems from Winter's Edge |
| All poems Copyright (c) 2006 by Jamie Parsley |
| 4 Poems by Xue Tao 1. We will never share these flowers that bloom on that afternoon that smells like love would smell if it could. We will never share the gut-deep sadness we would feel when the flowers fall to the ground to fold into themselves. If you ever wondered when I missed you most simply think this— I missed you when the flowers bloom up to the sky and I miss you when they shiver and fall dying to the ground. 2. Absently, I twist the grass blades into the shape of your heart and my heart— entwining the one to the other— and send it to you— the only one who understand my poems. It is spring and with it, a sorrow like thawing earth breaks the day apart. The sparrows who fled this place in the fall now sing songs so sad I almost want to die. 3. The wind—like the flowers—like the whole day— is growing old and dying. Does anyone know if—or even when— we’ll see each other again? If I can’t tie your heart to mine, why keep on tying heart-shaped knots in the grass. 4. Do the lilacs—growing fat on the branch— know how overwhelming it is when two people who love each other are not together? When I look at myself in the mirror, my tears are the shapes of spoons. Does the wind— blowing this spring with such recklessness— even know what tears are? Xue Tao (768-831) was a poet of the Tang Dynasty. |