By Matthew James Friday
THE TROUT I see you sliding over the muddy gold bed of the shallow river as it slips into Lake Lugano. You follow a flittering shoal of hope, gliding the thin layers between the different forms of air. I’m surprised by your size as you snuggle into the sheets of river and light. Lord of the muddier moments, king-sized in a peasant course, you draw me down the line of the green-grey water until merging with the unseen. A FEW SPRINKLED WORDS "How far is between the stars, how much farther is what’s right here..." -- Rilke Late August evening, light pollution a pastel scum fronging the pre-Alps around Lugano. I watch stars spell themselves. The Big Dipper points its paw to Polaris. Under Cassiopeia, the tail end of the Perseid meteor show, the dusty trail of the Swift-Tuttle comet on its 34-year love loop of the sun. I see only the last sparks, as small as grains of sand, spluttering kisses of the final flares. I’m not putting words in a god’s gaping mouth; no sprung mechanisms in mysterious workings. I only have, as Einstein said, a vague idea about that highest truth, the radiant beauty of the unsearchable and a sudden awareness at how fantastically minuscule my part is. A few sprinkled words. HURRY ON Drifting at the promenade of Desenzano Del Garda, admiring freshly fallen snow on the mountains that crown the pointed head of the Alpine lake. A building north wind promises in waves. Here is October tightening its chilling dress. We look down at the orange rock under our feet. Spun in the dark matter web of irregular lines a curling ammonite galaxy with ghostly white shell, a reminder of time flattened in plain sight. The shell spins and I hear the clocks ticking trillions of divisions, turning rocks into sand, caterpillars into butterflies, the hydrogen atoms into atomic bombs, my young parents into elderly people remembering their own parents this age, and me a once immortal boy now a middle-aged facsimile, puzzled at how quickly the sand runs. Now back on the promenade, marvelling at the fossil, pointing it out to friends who want to hurry on - aperitivo calling, snow falling, wine to be drunk, the absolute-zero of it all.
Matthew James Friday is a British born writer and teacher. He has been published in numerous international journals, including, recently: Dawntreader (UK), The Dillydoun Review (USA), Verbal Art (India), and Lunch Ticket (USA). The micro-chapbooks All the Ways to Love, The Residents, Waters of Oregon and The Words Unsaid were published by the Origami Poems Project (USA).
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