Prompt Images
I: Along rifted ice
Moonlight blanched against the rift ice
A still capturing animated light.
Forever twisted, gnarled and lurching.
A lone shorebird found in the features
of this frozen landscape.
Trapped in eternal youth through
An ephemeral medium.
Would it forsake such youth to take
flight again? Finding joys and follies
once more over the Michigan shore.
What Fortune enamored it to this
Place for too long a time– had it the
Wisdom to consider the temporal
Present. Where was the failure in Warmer climes,
only to submit to Love’s first selfish impulse.
In its vain need for altruism, for how can so
Familiar a sentiment cause a simple life so much pain?
II: Squall speaking with Michigan Shore
It started that evening out on open seas
The place rain would fall drumming,
Beating a heavy cadence in procession
across the water. Should I find a more
precise a symmetry, where on that
temporal plane balanced so finely
tumult and serenity.
What face, what face of primal alien solitude
far beyond brevity in the bend of the horizon
from some aeon unknown came its beatitude
that it estranged me from that spot.
The rain, it will end turning that beauty
and terror to the mundane,
until only I remain: salient a little longer
before I too return from whence I came.
III: Vapor imprints
Spirit, temporal and inexhaustible,
Whence risen vapor in the great
Atmosphere, only to resulting in
Dissipated heat like steam on the
Northern Lakes.
Listless the sea smoke stays: starting, failing,
Drifting ever further from the sun, yet
Permanently stalled in spite of the winter cold,
It refuses to sink for some errant memory.
Illegible and untenable, and all the same
persistent. What silent witness bears
your shapeless testimony?
Was it mine to understand or forget,
Yet to hold forever that obligation
Unknowingly.
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