from "The Hidden Well"


cyclamen numbers

window grins, black and liquid with snowy night,
throwing back at me the pathetic philosophy
of a much too anemic light-bulb –
the reading lamp stands straight,
like a last redoubt of volition
against the darkness dancing outside.

light flows like a perfect c minor,
running its arpeggio over the objects inside the room
and over the book waiting patiently
to feast on my attention and on my mind.

that book...is an orphan book.
i adopted it the other day.
whoever left it on that bench in the park
must've hoped for a good soul to provide it with shelter.
or maybe they simply forgot it...

anyway, that book...came to me like all my things...
you see, i find things.
i find them and i label them, with numbers,
with a marker.
a cyclamen marker.
that was the first thing i ever found.

i found boxes of all sorts, coins, a watch,
a woolen shawl
(that one i couldn't label...),
a flower pot with a weird tree in it
(a friend said it's a bonsai –
don't know what those are, it looks like a malformed child to me...),
i even found a cat once...
but that one licked itself
until the cyclamen number was gone from its fur.

that book is my latest found thing –
number 147.
cat purrs right next to it.

night strives to melt the window
and i gaze idly at the book's reflection –
makes me wonder if, at my turn, i'll ever be found too ...




Poetry by Lilly Negoi
Read 483 times
Written on 2012-12-18 at 09:39

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I find this imaginative and original and rather addictive. I have come back to read it many times.
2012-12-19


countryfog
"I find things" . . . I think very often it is the things that find us because as writers we keep learning the difference between just looking and actually seeing, not just passing through but entering into, how awareness becomes apprehension of the gifts given by a place and moment. Mine tend to be stones, feathers and flowers, doves' eggs and buckeyes, and last week an intact geode which I will not cut open because I prefer to keep its possibility intact. These I pass on to my grandchildren, who don't yet appreciate or understand them, but perhaps will one day truly "inherit" them as memories of me; my way of answering your question at the end.
2012-12-18