The Bluestone Review 2020

The Bluestone Review 2020

Poetry

At Some Distance and Years Later By James Owens

Blunt sun like a persistent bruise in the body of morning, clouded prisms of dew beading on the deck rail, the neighbours’ kids back at school, the blue and yellow plastic animals on the wet grass are reverting to nature, quietly, now that all their tame panics have leveled out to a wild calm. If I were going to say anything, it might be about the inventiveness of the wind, how a filmy green dress rises and settles, rises and settles around the sleek hips of the maple, as it steps a bit nearer its scarlet transformation. Me, too, catching a hint of red these days, a little closer to a weather that will not suffer denial. A time was, we were not afraid of anything, but now we have come, at last, to this plain confession, when toys fall apart in our hands, when each hurrying hour abrades another fraction of the past from the sky, falling like a dust that obscures what we know. The future blurs into the present, news a boy has thrown into the yard, a little model of the world, cheap paper softening grey with damp, soldiers’ faces pressed to the earth.

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