THE GALACTIC SPIRALS OF DEAD LEAVES
IV
THE ELLIPSE OF THE YEAR HAS TURNED
It is Winter,
The ellipse of the year has turned,
planets are on their way back
The sun, having arced, spirals back
from its solstice,
like a rubber band, snapped.
All balls fall back down to their gloves.
And the return of the Sun
Gives birth to a dozen religions.
But here, at the convergence,
The center of it all,
Where the red shift of stars, turning blue,
rush in upon us,
With an asphyxiation:
Like distant children in the park,
their shouts, muffled by the wind,
Rising up as clouds, to rain back upon them,
While mother’s call them from the distance.
All sounds are swallowed up in the black holes
of our mouths,
Where even Sunlight cannot escape,
And Newton’s mechanics in clocks breaks down.
Storm clouds, queue, to a funeral procession,
Suddenly,
It grows dark, overcast and silent,
And with the last drawn in breath of twilight,
the universe contracts,
Like a collapsed lung
inhaling the last light of stars,
As an old man in a rented room,
expires alone.
The present becomes past;
everything goes back, returning
To nature’s defense of seashells, fennel seeds,
and the fetal pose of embryos.
This time the effect precedes the cause,
As the slow condensation of space
bounds back into the big bang
Like the taut skin of a water bead.
And in the swirling eddy’s of dead leaves
the primeval shapes of circles, meanders and spirals,
I see the essential elements of stars,
The nut of all things
Go suddenly, silent,
As the world, like an acorn drops
into the palm of a child....
Copyright ©2007 John Thomas Tansey
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem