By: Cynthia Pitman

The Cloud and the North Wind

Propelled by the north wind,
a cloud rolls in,
crowding the blue sky.
She is arrayed in virginal white –
glossy Chinese satin and silk,
trailing a train of Spanish lace –,
all white, but for an edging
of dark gray bruising.
She enters at a slow pace,
a regal pace,
a pace designed for a bride.
But the wind is impatient
as he ushers her in.
He gusts behind her,
pushing her forward.
The gray bruising grows.
Again he gusts.
The bruising spreads.
His gusts grow stronger,
harder, faster.
She swells twice her former size,
then twice again, and twice again,
consuming the blue of the sky.
Her color turns purply black.
As she grows bigger,
lightning bolts split the sky.
Loud grumbles of thunder roar.
The wind gusts,
and this time does not stop.
Pushed and pushed and pushed,
she bruises black until
the swelling bursts
into torrential tears –
pelting rain stabbing the ground.
Chaos and cacophony reign:
surge, crest, break, fall.
Then the gusts quiet,
and the tears of rain
slow to a steady tempo.
Thus the marriage begins:
winter has set in.

Simple Things

The shape and pace of this world
no longer worry me.
When its edges sharpen to the point
where they lacerate my tender skin,
I soften them.
I reach back into the closeted corners
of my mind
and find the psychic sandpaper
that will grind and round them.
Then, if the outside comes in
too fast,
I slow it down
until its words lumber and roll,
plodding through viscous air.
I do it by blowing a cold breath
from my frozen lungs.
But if the outside slows,
bending space and time,
I spew fire
from the pit of my heart
where lava flows.
That’s all it takes now
to punctuate the sentence
that was imposed on me:
just simple things
that set me free.

The Priest in the Chapel

As the sun rises in the east,
the troubled young priest,
donned in a pristine
white baptismal robe,
makes his way up the worn path
of overgrown cobblestones.
He arrives at the age-old chapel
and stands before it for a moment,
looking up at the steeple stabbing the sky.
Then he takes the three steps up
to the rough-hewn oak door,
pushes it open, and enters.

Slowly, he walks toward the front altar.
But right before he reaches it,
he turns toward the east wall.
There looms the stained glass window.
Held captive by lead,
the shards of many colors
depict the Christ on the cross.
The young priest puts his feet together
and stretches his arms out to his sides,
mirroring the crucified Christ.
He raises his face to the colors.

Then – the sun breaks through.
Its fiery rays pierce the stained glass.
They permeate the colors
and reflect them onto the priest’s robe.
The body of the Christ
is superimposed upon him
in colors uncountable.
They soak through his robe
and seep into his soul,
saturating him in majestic castigation.
The lead burns, a molten admonition.
The priest seizes, then releases a cry:
the epitome of holy ecstasy.

The sun rises higher.
The piercing rays
follow it in retreat,
and with that,
the reflected colors recede.
The priest trembles.
Then, slowly, his muscles relax.
He lowers his arms, turns,
and stumbles the few steps to the altar.
There he falls to his knees,
clenches his hands before him,
and bows his head.
Sweat runs rivulets
down his forehead
as tears fall from his eyes.
He mumbles words
in an unknown tongue
that not even he can understand.
But the meaning is clear to all
who will open their ears and hear:
they are the humbled pleas
of a convicted penitent.

Deep Sea Creatures

Creatures of the inky dark deep
crawl and skirt the ocean floor.
Who first saw them,
shined light on them,
trapped them,
photographed them?
Who felt ordained
to take control of this dark domain
and name them –
as if it were a divine prerogative,
like that of the First Man
who named the creatures of Eden?

Surely it was those high school rejects,
those invisibles, who kept
their noses in books
while the rest of us treated them
with ignominy,
looking right through them,
only ever seeing them long enough
to call them cruel names
with sneering superiority.

Grown up now,
with doctoral degrees in science,
holding high positions
that endow dignity and elicit respect,
they used formal nomenclature
to give official names
to these bizarre creatures:

Lampocteis cruentiventer
Psychrolutes phrictus
Sebastolobus altivelis

But these former invisibles
still remembered from long ago
the names we had called them –
names that mocked them.
stalked them, hurt them,
and they called each creature
layman’s names, too,
names that sounded like the taunts
of school-yard bullies:

Bloody belly comb jelly
Blob sculpine
Longspine thornyhead

Or names that sounded
like the monsters of movies
they had watched,
sitting in the dark alone,
eating popcorn alone,
slurping warm soda alone,
licking their lips alone:

Bone-eating worm
Vampire squid
Pacific blackdragon
But in the dark, the invisibles
had their sweaty-palm secrets:
sweet fantasies of stunning beauty,
sublime visions of creatures of perfection,
either clinging to their arms
or facing them in their mirrors:
Crystal amphipod
Carnation coral
Fragile pink sea urchin

The creatures of the deep
don’t know their names.
They travel alone, looking for food,
Eating “marine snow” in the dark,
tiny droppings of biological debris
from the surface of the sea –
plankton, dead tissue, fecal matter –,
slurping the flakes
from the sea and the seabed,
they move, invisible,
through the dark deep.

But the scientists?
They delight in their power
over their seized domain.
The layman’s names
they call the deep sea creatures
are merely the only means
ever to be had by the scientists –
who had so long lived
invisible in the dark –
to finally exact revenge
upon the cruel world
they had travelled alone.

From Fifth Grade to Eternity

The teacher stood proudly
in front of the classroom.
Someone had once spilled
a jar of freckles on her face,
setting her hair on fire.
The orange-red flames
still licked at the air,
carving a jagged crown.
With her long, stringy fingers,
she fondled a piece of chalk
then drew a line all the way across the board.
She placed a < at the left end, then placed a > at the right end.
“That,” she said, “is time: ↔.”
She then sliced the middle of the line
with an emphatic│.
“This is the middle of our timeline: ←|→.”
She continued on with facts and dates,
unaware she had left me behind,
clinging to the middle│of time.
Terrified of sliding right,
crashing into the end > of time,
or sliding left,
crashing into the beginning <, I stayed there, immoveable, hanging desperately to the middle│. As she droned on, I figured out how to move along. I would sidestep time. I would take one pace to the space above, leaving my lifetime’s timeline behind, but stay tethered to reality – not with links and chains, but with my mind. I would walk parallel to the timeline, in tandem with myself, watching events unfold. But when my lifetime was over, I would not crash into the end > of time.
Instead I would travel to eternity ∞
which has no borderline.