“The Highway Home, Spying Sun”: a photograph and two poems

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It took me a while but I finally matched up one of my photographs with one of my poems.

THE HIGHWAY HOME, SPYING SUN

This light’s polished so as to
lure me to blindness.
What eye wouldn’t devour a
pearl ice cream cloud?
My sight sticks to the
cloud’s surface — molten hot
one instant, cool the next.

My eye and memory hang onto
that sky coaster arc, unafraid
of falling until I turned away, look back
and see the celestial slag
fallen into the water far, far below.

The car shakes and mocks the sight,
then turns wheels, cursing dull drivers and
then a sign: “WELCOME INTERIOR MULTI-HOSTESS SHOW”

The Pied Pipers of the lemon lemming-and-crumpet crowd?
How many ways would a
multi-hostess slice a pearl cloud
— & dole it onto gilded plates
for faintly drooling dinner club diners
still masticating from their prime rib —
especially if the pearl cloud matched her interior?

 

There’s a companion poem to THE HIGHWAY HOME, SPYING SUN. I wrote this second piece on the same trip back to Milwaukee from an escape to Wisconsin’s North Woods and a cabin in Pembine. Imagine the gloriously celestial sky accompanying “HIGHWAY HOME” inundated with black clouds and pelting rain. The ensuing poem is correspondingly darker.

RAIN IN THE LIGHT — Pembine, WI

Again, the windshield wiper streaked
liquid silver along the rainbow in view
and I wondered why so much rain fell
from the sunlight.

Was it because we drove
to where sky is so wide
no clouds could cover,
where crust of age falls away to river spray,
the hurdle of timeless still,
over bugs and our feet?

Or was it because we stood
on the rounded edge between darkness and
tomorrows lifted like wings of the eagle
clutching the will to prey, feed and multiply
while our leaders aped his fierce eye
and strangled the air until clicking heads
saw destination instead of sky,
till rockets spit down fire and
hell fell from above,
while our windshield wipers ape wings of
memory?

Copyright — Kevin Lynch 2014

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