Category: Poetry

Beauty occurs in sudden relationships: daylight from two windows falling differently on two sides of a face at once, an adjective from childish things cropping up in a phrase that would otherwise be too full of mourning, an arm in clay with a bent elbow I tilt or extend just enough to finally embrace its atmosphere.

Perhaps it’s easiest to say this — There are stones, bricks, metal and mountains. There is the great volume of space around these things. And there is how light shines down upon these things, warming them, making even the hardest surfaces shimmer.

What is peripheral is
              often not even what is considered,
                            but what passes just beyond
                                          our vision may momentarily

flutter there and be so enchanting
              that it offers a revelation as to
                            why butterflies are emblematic
                                          of the evanescent. 

The notes fall on our ears like petals to the earth,

And sound waves like the skirts of silver seas

Send rippling glassy swells through listeners’ souls –

As a poet who had studied under Robert Lowell and Archibald MacLeish, David Berman shared his impeccably beautiful formal verse with the Powows, but kept his darker, often free verse poems, in his notebooks.