Ashley Anna McHugh

From “Three Odes” – Donald Justice

In Lines on April 13, 2009 at 7:35 AM

Cool Dark Ode

[...]

“… the bedroom,
where even then we imagined ourselves extinguished
by your total embrace”

[...]

“Night, night, O blackness of winter,
I tell you this, you
That used to come up as far as the frosted panes, the door,
As far as the edges of our skin,
Without any thought, I know now,
Of entering those borrowed rooms,
Or even our mouths, our eyes,
Which all too often were carelessly left open for you.”

Warm Flesh-Colored Ode

“… there are probably other hands which have stopped,
Or will stop, or even now are shaken with premonitions
Of a time when they will have begun to stop.”

[...]

Pale Tepid Ode

“Not with the vague smoke
In the curtains,
Not with the pigeons or doves
Under the eaves,
Nevertheless you are there, hidden,
And again you wake me,
Scentless, noiseless,
Someone or Something
Something or someone faithless,
And that will not return.

Undiscovered star,
That fade and are fading,
But never entirely fading,
Fixed,
And that will not return.

Someone, someone or something,
Colorless, formless,
And that will not return.”

 

(CP 168)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.