Sunday, March 29, 2009

Aerial Canopy

This is the second edited version of a "photograph poem", one where we had to describe a photograph with clear details but while still adequately answering the question: "So what?". This poem may undergo a few more edits before I am pleased with it, but the following is one of the attempts:


A tenebrous figure sits on the tawny sand,
as the dusking sky turns from blue to purple,
resembling sweet peas as they age and
wilt. The diaphanous waves, each
oscillating back and forth from the horizon
to the shore, each swell folding a secret to be
unraveled like the thread of a spool,
its release imminent, tightly held by this man—
his emerald green eyes vacant,
his sanguine lips cracked, his shoulders
as vast as this sea. He looks up to the silhouette
parasailing, the white voile beckoning him,
he yearns to seize the braided string of
imaginary hemp, to lift himself up
and flutter away with this aerial canopy,
yet his terrestrial tendencies leave him
grounded, solitary on the loose,
scorching sand, as soft as the underside of
her arm, the ivory limestone rock formations
in the background as he contemplates
his escape. That is when she lost him,
her grip slowly loosening,
the woman whose eye of kohl lay
behind the camera, releasing her grip
from the metal, cool apparatus as
she walks away, burying her cigarette
and him in the sand, the smoke
ascending to the violent sky.

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