| Current mood: |  contemplative |
| Current music: | Evanescence - All That I'm Living For |
Blogger's Silent Recitation
For the blogger's silent recitation day. Link here.
Dissolution
by Arthur Reynolds
For 1001 days
James (Not Jimmy, Jimbo, or Jim)
Sat in a 6 x 6 cell, cubicle
And between gouts of numbers,
Columns of entries,
Rows of figures,
Stole glimpses of a
Five-dollar oil painting
Bought at a yard sale,
Until the flicker and hum
Of the yellow fluorescent lighting
(Not the color of daylight through leaves,
But the color of tobacco stained glass)
Made the trees of
The two-dimensional forest
Shimmer and whisper
On invisible breezes.
On the 1001st day
(The day after the thousandth)
James dragged himself
From the mire
Of ledgers,
Sums,
And balances,
To walk to the edge of the painting,
Then he wandered farther in.
At first he moved silently as a ghost
Across the luxuriant carpeting of
Rust-colored pine needles,
Sidling between
Black Spruce
And Moss bedecked Poplars
Down the slope
Towards the floor of the basin,
Passing through waist-deep flame heather
Like wading a sea of balmy lava,
While the fog gathered in wisps and curls
Round his ankles
Hiding his black leather oxfords.
Still he pressed on
Deeper into the gathering gloom
Never looking back,
Always ahead,
Always towards the distant clatter
Of moving water
Reminiscent of temple bells,
Even as the fog consumed his knees
And waist.
Forward he idled,
Passing banks of Lace Ferns,
Each step emptier than the last,
Never expecting to
Emerge again into light.
As the fog thickened and
Swallowed his cheeks,
James became certain that
There was nothing left below the mist,
Nothing that was James,
And nothing that was not.
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alliemaddyn) wrote,
