Not A Black Wind On A Blue Day
Not a black wind on a blue day
but definitely grey.
Enter image of a slumping gas pump
with red paint flaking off it
and a coca cola sign just as old
hanging lop-sided
above an abandoned grocery store
across a small wooden bridge on a dirt road
beside an old stone mill with a seized waterwheel
that stopped turning in the flow of the river a long time ago.
Now take it a step further
and try to imagine a black pot-belly stove
in the middle of the wooden-floored grocery store
with people warming their hands around it
like petals turned toward
this black sun that shines at midnight
almost cast iron cherry red when its stoked
with two year old red oak
and it's snowing thick and heavy outside
as if someone got into a pillow fight with swans
and there's an orange-apricot glow
ripening on the drifts under the storefront windows,
that tints the blue snow
towards its complementary violet
and everything looks like a picture-perfect oil painting
on a nineteen-fifties Christmas card.
And there are people inside. Can you see them?
They look like dark, habitable planets transiting the light
of another star seventy-one light years from here.
Silhouettes of men who are always wiping their hands on a rag
as if they just finished fixing something,
farm wives asking the grocery clerk
who cooked which pie
and whose were selling the most,
kids as impatient as snowballs
waiting for their skates to be sharpened
that expect you to use your imagination
to fill in the negative spaces
and give them the benefit of the doubt as to the rest.
The river that runs beside the mill
isn't all that wide but it canters
over a Stonehenge of creek stones
like a blue-black anthracite horse
with a white mane
that's no longer harnessed
to the tyranny of equinoctial wheels.
And I'd expect to see more trucks
than cars parked outside
and feel that everybody
took a secret pride in being trusted enough
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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