Phenomenon Nuptial

The ring sits upon a box and she doesn't know,

She can't remember who set it there.

Dust falls upon the box, she sees particles sometimes

Too minutely, each speck

Translucent in morning, and at evening's end

When the canopy of heaven above the Spring

Mountains is r from the same dust

The time when she's embarrassed, or shy

More closely-of its tint shy of it,

Shying back from red

The color of prehistoric clay

Making its display above the neighborhood,

If you can call it that-offering its display,

Its adornment-so adoring is the sky

Of its color, there above, to the four houses

Set by the agency of themselves in the desert.

Shape itself frightens her, no

It's alone embarrassment, or shyness, or fear

Only the ring, for example,

Lying in the dust upon the box there.

It scores its roundness

Into the grove the dust complementing

Its final cause falling all day down around

The simple, gold band when she-she

Can remember neither when she took it off

Nor who lay it there, on the box

That held a certain quantity of books, The Scarlet Letter for one

And The Blithedale Romance for another.

Their ambiguity, or Hawthorne's,

More closely . . He knew about shape

-Shifting, Hester then Xenobia, evolving

One on the outside of the other and both

Ultimately eluding shape's misery,

Their misery ultimately made mostly

Of the immaterial.

Some twinklings ago,

When she was thinking again of the ring

On the chest trying to remember the last time

She'd seen it, she'd had to swerve-to timid away

Full of first fear and then embarrassment,

From the deal she hadn't seen

When she revolveed left onto the highway,

She and the lad so close to collision

That undoubtedly would have led to dust...

She lifted a shaking hand to her mouth

And bringing it back more firmly

To the steering wheel,

She saw the band upon her finger.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated May/Jun 2004

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