Call and Response

How simply it begins, the gaze turned
by native bewilderment or inborn acumen
from the kind adults at table, from the sapien stream
of talk, to color, shadow, form, and light:
to the purple-blue-gray shadow cast by a bowl —

or the ivory column with its mute, self-evident
meaning; to the tracery of a branch defining
existence, definitively, in mid-air;
to the dark red leaf encased in wintry ice,
so calmly become a cold, gleaming beauty;
to the ur-theater of late afternoon light

religiously streaming, overpowering cliché
from under a bank of dark, low-lying cloud;
to the pale, breathing undersides of leaves
forecasting a distant, fast-arriving front;
to cattail seeds streaming towards germination;

and to the thickets and tangles into which
we see but partially, the unspoken-for patches;
and water surfaces shining, ever-skating
toward a horizon — all things of the world propelling
a call and response, tendering forms and shapes
for being and mind, for meaning, and for making.

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
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