November
Beauty of remnants:
wan leaf under log
a paper scallop shell,
pale-peach color.
A rough ribbon of aspen bark
rasps against its trunk,
a violin, a sound
of one hand clapping.
Cold morning, even sunlight
hunkered down.
Earth has borrowed the moon’s pallor,
certain, pure.
The sere plains, blanched with frost
flow forward from the hills
like the flanks
of some enormous beast.
Silence whispers
a strange song,
soon, soon.
MARIA BERARDI‘s work has appeared in local and national magazines and online. Her first collection, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and she is currently at work on her second. She lives in the Front Range foothills west of Denver with her family, at precisely 8,888 feet above sea level (Coloradoans always gotta tell you what their altitude is). Her process is one of listening for transmissions from the cosmic radio and trying to catch them on paper before they dissipate: the glimpse, the complicated knowledge.
Twyckenham Notes 