Page 7 - Contrast1977Aprilv20n2

ONE EVENING IN WESTMINSTER
"Forms passed this way and that through the dull light. And that was life."

- James Joyce

Nightfall pokes the thin air
with crooked branches

footsteps banter
on the stone walk
in this place

that does not know our names,
or care to hear our passing
in the spilled, clattering echo
of vague circumstance.

The sound of stones
worn thin beneath the
dull and aimless forms
of strangers nudges safe memories
to bespeak their lie:

my father, once, in a place
we never thought to name
or wonder at its passing,
mastered the art of skipping stones--
made them sing with one swift
whip of elbow, wrist and palm--

a blind motion that made rocks
dance across the Delaware
in four clean steps
the river never heard
or felt beneath its passing,
until the beauty of such moments
were piled into my imperfect past.

And now, who is to know
the soft music of such stones,
wherever settled, sunken, or passed over
as strangers bury their crossed paths in a rapid dark.
Who can smoothe the cold edges
of these passing shapes, and forms and human stones
sung softly to their grave
in the dance of their own father's motion?

My footsteps speak their own
frayed echo in this night defined
in starlit shapes that
fall into vague thoughts
I can not know, or even trace among
that swollen pile of stones we skipped
but never named or noticed in their falling--
made dance with flight but never counted,
in that free air of summer, when all forms are gold.

- Nancy K. Barry