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As If She Were Fishing the Air*
by Becky Dennison Sakellariou

 

I too have heard about joy,
how it arrives in a thousand hymns,

how it comes with the saffron sun
sliding through shadowed angles

as my tires leap the hump
in the track at the end of the day.

Or with sudden black and white
stripes, whirling wings

like wheels flashing through the brush,
tsalapetinos, plumed orange.

Or the clematis, winding its way,
song yellow, up the back fence

as if rust were just the right
material to lean against.

It could come with the woman
at the cliff's blue edge in Tainaro

throwing her nets for quail
as if she were fishing the air.

Or the evening wind,
high sounds of water

fingering the leaves of the old poplar tree
askew at the field's end.

I think it may be the crow
and the seagull, brothers

in our night storms, sweet glaze
of rain licking their wings.

I stand in the early morning fields, damp,
bending toward my body,

carrying it in trust
into the unknowing.

 

*with thanks to Diana Farr Louis for the phrase