Photo by Beth Burrell

by Joanne Clarkson

Andromeda

Not quite dawn when fear
wakes me from a dream I don’t remember.
I walk out onto the deck, surprised
the sky is clear. A bright planet
rises in the East, early worshipper.
Overhead a blur of clustered stars,
galaxy of a girl chained to a stake at sea.
I feel her shudder and breathe
with the strike of each wave, bitter chafing
and the beauty of deep luminescence.
Her name is Andromeda and she is
the impulse of cruelest perversion of love.
Soon a winged horse will rescue her.
But at the moment, cast out of dream,
she strains to hear the whales,
echo of a million light years
of longing. The beach is only
a ten-minute walk from where I live.
I hear the surf. Or is it wind,
maybe a car carrying a worker to an early
shift at the mill, hospital, bakery?
Or the whoosh of the feathers of legend?
Who can say how we save each other?

***

Bone Window

Mornings, Georgia O’Keeffe walked
the high desert until she found
her frame, white and weathered,
the famous pelvic bone. Kneeling,
holding it up, heavy, the relic
re-created her blue.

Once I hiked inland dunes
and found a tiny white fossil.
The guide warned I couldn’t keep it.
I knew it was a shell.
I grew up by the sea.
It took me home in wind song.

Mornings, Georgia wandered the wide
canvas of mesa and dunes until she
found her window. Angle of vision
to make the world her own.

Evenings, I comb the beach
where sand, horizon and sky
coalesce in a fragment of nacre,
my mirror into loveliness,
where the mind becomes the moon.

***

Lavender Horses

Is it only twilight or have the horses
turned the color
of the outermost edge of the rainbow
forever?

Is it the ancient pulse of stars – their dying
or their long, long, endless
lifetime
that widens the dark world in the center
of my eyes
to see the beauty of animals?

This time of year, nights short,
dawn a brief whinny away,
the horses sleep in the pasture
with frogs and foxes
a passing possum
all of them some shade of violet.

And in this vista
I feel the shudder that is color
rise up and through
as if I galloped among the purple of mares
and foals and stallions,
as if in the morning
I too might wear a lavender star
forever
high up on my forehead.