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AN EXTRAORDINARY TWILIGHT
By Quentin Smith
For a moment the cool, crimson sun was here
And now it is gone, leaving behind
A gloomy trail of red memories
And a room filled to the ceiling,
With the odure of fears from half-imagined signs
Of obdurately indecipherable portents.
In this extraordinary twilight
That I cannot believe in,
Twelve blackened robes
Speak soundlessly to me of the details
Of their well-planned, purple doom awaiting me.
Outside another window, a red, wounded wind
Breathes violently in the maples,
And the rotting leaves are strewn
About like the dead things
Of some strange war.
A circle of perfect blue
Is suddenly disclosed to me, seven miles away
At the farthest edge of this uncanny land.
A white sea-hawk and the melody of a thousand flutes
glide from the center of the blue sphere.
Gramarye valleys and ancient mountains are slowly
Appearing in this far-away azure.
And now I vow that
All paths of wandering are foreclosed,
Except the escape flight that flashes
Across the suburban wilderness,
And rises like starving lightning to
The reflecting blue and guilded goldwork,
The flight rises to the place where everything
Is transfigured by its own presentness.
Each thing’s apparent identity
Is stripped away to reveal that naked it
Is nothing but an abstraction from the largest Presence,
A complexifixed appearance of the Pure Simplicity
That complexly we trudge the laberynthes to reach.
Written 2002
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