Ritual Sight

What a wonderful word- sight. I love that it is a homonym with site. That's what started me writing this long ago. Now, I posted part i earlier, then realized I had done a rewrite two years ago of the complete five part series, because the old one written twelve years before really fell apart at the end. So, now I will start the post and write up of the revised version.

Ritual Sight

i.

On the afternoon lake where ducks
Strike water, rise
Over cracked suns, you lean your hips

Sighing, against cement wall, hands out
For wind to lift
And see your face recede, depthless

In singing green. Green reflecting
Bowl of azure
Sky and blond apartment tower.

Here starlings return at dusk to take
The mirrored dusk-
Their circling stayed in daylight

As the lake now holds your face. Bricks
Stretch beneath your
Feet like turtle shells. Night, the

Daylight's shadowed armada, pushes
To land, you see
Their double masts, their posted oars,

Rock toward the wall, listening for
Keels to scrape and
The soldiers' sandals on wood docks.

Cry out and your voice creases, dies
In air- released,
Or captured to welcome the dusk.


I see I'll have to go on and put the poem written in 1992 up against the rewrite in 2004 and explain what I did, and why I did it. Just an interesting note on this one is that I changed "bats" to "starlings" and "dark" to "dusk". They were both meant to be more honest to the scene. When I was writing a good deal, just out of college, I had an unnecessary inclination to change a scene to fit words I liked, or felt were more dramatic. Bats? Who knows. But the scene at the time was actually, as witnessed by me, starlings circling an apartment tower near where I grew up. And it was dusk, a beautiful deep blue dusk. I have no idea why I felt the need to change things like that, but my revision is to be more honest to the scene.