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ABSOLUTES
Let there be days soft and deceptive
the taste of water absolute
the inner sun absolute
and our awakening absolute
Let our life fly over fields
filled with radiance we almost touch
air we almost embrace
and moments of near fullness
We are one with the legendary shadows
smiling with apricot lips and vanilla voices
singing the sea's high sound
in a rush of joy before dark
When the last feather of light floats down
on the ripening hours
the breath grows visible
dividing and dividing stillness
We recall fine tunings of sun
the moon's ancestral silver
fugitive years and moments
nudging enchantment when we wore
the loose limbs of childhood
and watched endless springs and summers
steeped in the music
of long-traveling light
A HAIRLINE FRACTURE
Stunned by morning, she slips out of bed
Stands barefoot on the cold tile
Looks into the mirror
suddenly aware of her skull, jaw
and bones just below the surface
She's a skeleton clothed in flesh and thought
waiting for wonder
vivid with longing.
Last night, she watched sunset
until the lost colors of evening
Then in the narrowing hours she imagined
stars with fins, stars with feet
the bone white eye of the moon
and in a trance of blue-veined dreams
she's lost in the Museum of Natural History
with feather, wing, shell
the black center of time
and the salt wash of the sea
Away from the stone music of the street
away from the empty eyes of ancestors
and the great noise of it all, she sits
hollow-boned with the midnight people
as the owl's outspread wings shadow the earth
MOTHER OF ALPHABETS
You call me from the under skin of sleep
beyond the dream of dust and drought
of spring floods and rings of fire.
You store in the heart's hollow
a perfect memory. Your soft-skinned inner arms
begin the story of my life.
You teach me how to enter the day
how to be quiet, marooned in a tongue of shade
where there's no sound as startling as silence.
Musing on the black keys, I know what I know:
how the seasons insist and encourage,
how dark eyes of water glitter through grass in the spring
how the heart tugs at the end of September
how December's crust leads me back
to frozen footsteps and idling light.
Snake dancing before the blaze
I'm blanketed by winds
protected by cave shadows
but if I step out of the circle
the earth worm will find me
Better a damaged day of almost spring
expanding without limits than a safe haven
austere and silent.
Better the cactus and its thorny geometric
than the night-blooming orchid.
There is no such thing as no such thing
and I am oracle and secret
like a lone feather on the breath of a wind
Ruth Daigon was founder and editor of POETS ON: for twenty years until it ceased publication. Her poems have been widely published in E mags, print mags, anthologies and collections. . . Daigon's poetry awards include "The Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, 1997 (University of Southern California Anthology, 1997) and the Greensboro Poetry Award (Greensboro Arts Council, 2000). The latest of seven books is "Payday At The Triangle" (Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series) based on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City,1911 was published in 2001 and one of her many readings was performed in The Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan, the area where the fire occurred. "Handfuls of Time" (Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series), her last book, was published in 2002, Her poetry was published by the State department in their literary exchange with Thailand and their translation program has just issued the first book of Modern American poets in English and Thai in which she appears. Garrison Keillor featured her poetry on his morning poetry show. She has just cut a CD of her poetry for Jaimes Alsop Productions and appeared in The Mississippi's Review's issue on War and its Aftermath. (February 2007)
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