Thursday, December 17, 2009

JIgsaw Puzzle

There's the Stones song, of course, and then there's this new poem by A. E. Stallings on Poetry Daily today:

JIGSAW PUZZLE

First, the four corners,
Then the flat edges.
Assemble the lost borders,
Walk the dizzy ledges,

Hoard one color—try
To make it all connected—
The water and the deep sky
And the sky reflected.

Absences align
And lock shapes into place,
And random forms combine
To make a tree, a face.

Slowly you restore
The fractured world and start
To recreate an afternoon before
It fell apart:

Here is summer, here is blue,
Here two lovers kissing,
And here the nothingness shows through
Where one piece is missing.

*

"I'm just trying to do this jigsaw puzzle ..." (No live version on You Tube, unfortunately! At least that I could find with a quick search.)

[Breaking my blogging silence for a moment. A stressful semester is almost over: lots of grading, lots of illness in the family, including me. Much to blog about come January: lots of poems have crossed my path recently that I would like to post comments on!]