The Hard Frieze

Poetry | L. Ward Abel

The sheet-flow out across the hard frieze  

is black and white and deepest green,  

         pacific.  

A back-country,  

the sun soon to crown it, sleeps  

corralled in broad yards  

and once-teeming groves: 

          I pause. 

Such holy places tend to whisper  

profound  

pronounced under-breath 

          serious like knives but 

curative,  

         a clarity  

like rusted razor wire and salve 

combined,  

          an open field, a mountain  

where even shadows flash 

now in a blur of orange  

and powder blue.    

A pilgrim may stagger-through  

          irredeemable darkness  

but can spark in subzero, 

calling up southerlies from  

where the earth’s middle  

        widens like a plant grows. 

In a world of half-assed searchers 

proof is nothing compared to faith— 

conclusions can change, theorems  

overflow their shifty banks and onto  

          dime-a-dozen  

          blank space.  

So much 

for certainties: I stir again. 

Away the quiet ride,  

maybe a voice finds me.