Hanna Plotnikava, Pomegranate
Of the Day Come Now Gone
E. Robert Pugh
Of a village on the shore where the terraced houses step toward the sea, a giant’s staircase coarsened by sand in the distended sunlight, the light that never ends, the light that calls for great shutters on latitude faces–sun without surcease, sun pinned to a low point in late afternoon sky, a zoetrope created of the world.
Here, it is warm to the skin and balmy on the breeze. Beneath the perfumes lay the smell of aloe on everyone, so given to redness in the pinkwhite with its thumbtack holding firm while souls ache for it to etch the last of its journey into the sea, to bring on the stars and the reprieve of black coolness instead of the rays that bake their skin, wilt and wither them with a desert’s patience.
No answers, only arms raised in confusion, eyes bulging with I Don’t Know as the lackluster days of sunbathed sameness hold court over perception, all of it running together: the halt of time while their bodies carry on with the Slow March. Except in one of the houses, in one of the rooms, where those betrothed watch before open doors the perpetual motion of a sea still so committed to the moon, with a secret held between them: their love, their role, she the day and he the night, who locked eyes and saw wholeness against the vacuous circle. In the golden light tinged with sherbet clouds, they remained as residents–new, but excellent at small talk. They melded into the fabric and complained along with them about flattened time, comparing pictures of the night.
But it was not forever. What they knew would come during all these warm days, that they held at arm’s length with an unwillingness to accept, arrives now on the horizon’s waterline: a glimmering ocean liner enlarging, with opaque masts and diaphanous sails filled with steam.
They look to one another, the last time for a long time, a gaze that finds them in the immediate of their choice that day when they halted the sky, green into brown once again–this slow arrival and the cycle it bears.
E. Robert Pugh
Of a village on the shore where the terraced houses step toward the sea, a giant’s staircase coarsened by sand in the distended sunlight, the light that never ends, the light that calls for great shutters on latitude faces–sun without surcease, sun pinned to a low point in late afternoon sky, a zoetrope created of the world.
Here, it is warm to the skin and balmy on the breeze. Beneath the perfumes lay the smell of aloe on everyone, so given to redness in the pinkwhite with its thumbtack holding firm while souls ache for it to etch the last of its journey into the sea, to bring on the stars and the reprieve of black coolness instead of the rays that bake their skin, wilt and wither them with a desert’s patience.
No answers, only arms raised in confusion, eyes bulging with I Don’t Know as the lackluster days of sunbathed sameness hold court over perception, all of it running together: the halt of time while their bodies carry on with the Slow March. Except in one of the houses, in one of the rooms, where those betrothed watch before open doors the perpetual motion of a sea still so committed to the moon, with a secret held between them: their love, their role, she the day and he the night, who locked eyes and saw wholeness against the vacuous circle. In the golden light tinged with sherbet clouds, they remained as residents–new, but excellent at small talk. They melded into the fabric and complained along with them about flattened time, comparing pictures of the night.
But it was not forever. What they knew would come during all these warm days, that they held at arm’s length with an unwillingness to accept, arrives now on the horizon’s waterline: a glimmering ocean liner enlarging, with opaque masts and diaphanous sails filled with steam.
They look to one another, the last time for a long time, a gaze that finds them in the immediate of their choice that day when they halted the sky, green into brown once again–this slow arrival and the cycle it bears.