Barry Ballard
a poem
**
Waking
. . . step back,
Heave, and a light, a little light, will nimbus your going forth.
...............- Charles Wright, "Apologia Pro Vita Sua"
You're seeing the world with its sharp-angled
shadows, colorless, speaking in your sleep
like an inward prophet with the window-sill's
ashes in his hands. Only cold light weeps,
but the heart tries to swallow it, the stark
refractions, scrambled landscapes, the gleaming
beads of violet transcendence. What part
wakes in the actor's mask of your blinking
shutter? What part breathes the sky's resuscitating
breath leaking through the blinds? The day itself,
a sacrament: the mundane as sacred
bread; and the opposite of fear pulsating,
moving you through the truth - that is held
like light in the center of your deep sleep.
**
return to sawbuck 1.8
**
Barry Ballard’s poetry has most recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Connecticut Review, Margie, and Puerto del Sol. His most recent collection is A Body Speaks Through Fence Lines (Pudding House, 2006) He writes from Burleson, Texas.
**
Waking
. . . step back,
Heave, and a light, a little light, will nimbus your going forth.
...............- Charles Wright, "Apologia Pro Vita Sua"
You're seeing the world with its sharp-angled
shadows, colorless, speaking in your sleep
like an inward prophet with the window-sill's
ashes in his hands. Only cold light weeps,
but the heart tries to swallow it, the stark
refractions, scrambled landscapes, the gleaming
beads of violet transcendence. What part
wakes in the actor's mask of your blinking
shutter? What part breathes the sky's resuscitating
breath leaking through the blinds? The day itself,
a sacrament: the mundane as sacred
bread; and the opposite of fear pulsating,
moving you through the truth - that is held
like light in the center of your deep sleep.
**
return to sawbuck 1.8
**
Barry Ballard’s poetry has most recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Connecticut Review, Margie, and Puerto del Sol. His most recent collection is A Body Speaks Through Fence Lines (Pudding House, 2006) He writes from Burleson, Texas.
