Three Poems by Anca Vlasopolos

 

 

Morning Doves

 

doves

            like drops of near-vanquished darkness

                        caught on high branches

hang

            backlit

                        by winter dawn

 

I may want to weigh them

            with symbolism

                        you      you      you      dusky capsules

                                    hiding souls of my dear lost ones

                        radiance beginning its ascent

 

but truth

is

they live          they fall           soar in a hurry of dropped feathers from fierce talons

 

for themselves             alone

 

And No Soul Sing

 

just as in youth when—lover absent—

each soft-grass meadow made blood

            course              engorge           skin tingle with desire

each hidden nook        each dale

                        bore imprint of mind’s eye rapture

 

so now when winter winds rev up with motor fury

our mortal dress rips a little more

bones               through every screaming tatter          

answer bare choirs’ clatter

yearn for the letting go

                                    for breaking coils

                        to join storms’ boundless grind

 

As it flows

 

No longer does the color of the world stay within bounds. Perhaps we only thought it does, for bark on the distant pine becomes camouflaged bird, the rare bird on the beach turns into an ancient boulder encrusted with barnacles and algae, lily pads opening under pond skin swim, changing to orange koi, bearded lichens clothe bare choirs in glamour of springtime, pinecone clinging—a swinging nest, or nest left over from last year’s brood—a cone, seedless, swaying.

Anca Vlasopolos: the award-winning novel The New Bedford Samurai; the award-winning memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement; four collections of poems, Often Fanged Light (Adelaide Books, 2019), Cartographies of Scale (and Wing) (2015), Walking Toward Solstice (2012, and Penguins in a Warming World (2007); three poetry chapbooks, a detective novel, Missing Members, and over three hundred poems and short stories in literary journals.

 

www.vlasopolos.com

"No matter how bad things get you got to go on living, even if it kills you."—Sholem Aleichem