Vision

by Richard Stimac

I’d like to say I saw a summer thunderstorm flood across the eastern sky,
but wires and cables and lines and cords suspended upon poles and posts
and towers and pylons sliced my vision into tight-fitting rectangles and squares.

The heavens were nothing more than right-angled pieces of a sliding puzzle
that my mind moved and unmoved until the fractured image of dusk
combined its parts into a coherent whole I both recognized and remembered.

But in my memory, for the life of me, the taut lines come to the forefront,
like the balanced planes of black pigment harmonized in a Mondrian painting,
but with gray rolling stacks of cumulonimbus clouds in place of primary colors.

That’s how it is, isn’t it, our desire refocuses from what we desire to what blocks
our desire. We want what keeps us from what we want. Solving the riddle gives
more pleasure than solutions. Coherence precludes movement. We need loss.

I do and use the fissures in life to mark time: birth; death, love; and loss.
Days, months, years rise like morning mist I wander unaware through,
until a ray of sunlight pierces the suspended ice crystals. That is all I see.