Darkening, Then Brightening by Kim Addonizio

February 20, 2015   Darkening, Then Brightening   Kim Addonizio

The sky keeps lying to the farmhouse, lining up its heavy clouds above the blue table umbrella, then launching them over the river. And the day feels hopeless until it notices a few trees dropping delicately their white petals on the grass beside the birdhouse perched on its wooden post, the blinking fledglings stuffed inside like clothes in a tiny suitcase. At first you wandered lonely through the yard and it was no help knowing Wordsworth felt the same, but then Whitman comforted you a little, and you saw the grass as uncut hair, yearning for the product to make it shine. Now you lie on the couch beneath the skylight, the sky starting to come clean, mixing its cocktail of sadness and dazzle, a deluge and then a digging out and then enough time for one more dance or kiss before it starts again, darkening, then brightening. You listen to the tall wooden clock in the kitchen: its pendulum clicks back and forth all day, and it chimes with a pure sound, every hour on the hour, though it always mistakes the hour.            Copyright © 2015 by Kim Addonizio. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I was spending the week alone in a farmhouse in upstate New York, trying and mostly failing to write. Finally I just wrote about the present moment.” —Kim Addonizio   Kim Addonizio is the author of My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014) with woodcuts by Charles D. Jones. She teaches private workshops online and divides her time between Oakland, California, and New York City. Photo Credit: Lin Tan Most Recent Book by Addonizio   My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014) "In Betweenness" by Pierre Joris "Slur" by Jacek Gutorow "The Moon in Time Lapse" by David Rivard Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.