third person

third person

Acknowledgements to partycity.com for use of this image taken from their product catalogue.

try
as we might
to speak to
to the
‘you’,
to address the
‘you’ of the
departed,
the hedge
once climbed
through
in touch
in talk
toward
the heart of
that ‘you’,
in its own sun
of orchard self,
now lashings
of thorn
around a
failed garden,
though we call
upon that ‘you’
we know the shift
in night rains, the
branch that scrapes
against the high window
of dream, the shadow
unbound at the foot
of the cypress at noon,
how that ‘you’ as natural
as a leaf to lie turns to
the ‘third person’, the
‘he’, the ‘she’ that,
no matter how strong
in memory, hollows in
transparency of dusk,
something that was
on the fingers, now
gone and it
dawns that
the ‘i’ that stands
before your every
act shall one day
be heard that
‘third person’ in
other mouths
when yours
has been
misplaced
in reams
of darkness
whatever
afterlight
you think
in

june 2019
riverside ave in winter storm

Copyright ©2019 Peter Le Baige.  All Rights Reserved

Click on the link above to hear a reading of the poem.  The accompanying music is from the opening of Silouans Song by Arvo Pärt from the album ‘Summa’ recorded by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra under Paavo Järvi.