OFF A SIDE ROAD NEAR STAUNTON
Some nothing afternoon,
no one anywhere,
an early autumn stillness in the air,
the kind of empty day you fillby taking in
the full size of the valley
and its layers leading
slowly to the Blue Ridge, the quality of the country,if you stand here long enough, you could stay
for, step into, the way a landscape, even on a wall,pulls you in, one field at a time,
pasture and fall
meadow, high above the harvest, perfectto the tree line, then spirit clouds and intermittent
sunlight smoky rain riding the tops of the mountains,though you could walk until it's dark
and not reach those rains --
you could walk the rest of the day into the pictureand not know why,
at any given moment,
you're there.
Stanley Plumley
Stanley Plumly is the author, most recently,of "Posthumous Keats:
A Personal Biography"
(Norton, 2008).
All rights reserved.
So the dark figure falls
ReplyDeletebackward, arms out and
eyes wide, through the purple
door to another
world. No hint had
been given him
that he would be called
upon and taken
into this painting.
-Micheal Palmer
love the weird juxtaposition of a poem about a landscape & images of a circus...
this is the short version of what I'd originally written- whose bright idea was it to put the "search" button right next to the "spell check" button?
lovely piece, evan. truly.
ReplyDeleteand as you say in your poem-- letting go is not always expected. to walk above the air, you could be anywhere.