Aubade
The mid-morning light feeds my words,
a vice I got from painters great and poor
who labor in a rabbled mess, whose works
crowd my walls. They taught my eye to pour
details from the common rummage of bungled names
which sprang from a maker’s moment and now dissolve
in daily fray. This light forbids the vain
ponderance, raises the crevice from the blunt of gloved
quotidians to stand disrobed in the solar mind.
The pool’s motioned lace, the orchid’s lobe,
the squirrel tail’s refrain that curves to rhyme
its jolts. Morning welcomes the mind’s grope
of all it becomes. This throng of world can hope
to choir when function’s silenced by verdant trope.
Flying over Bonaire
Against the unwound spring of coast
whose bowl curve frills with surf,
I see the earth blushing
in a lace of last-suds clouds.
The vapor crumplings have aligned
into a counter curve, just as lax,
and, like the coast, almost straight now
that the wind has taken the tide’s cue.
These two premonitions of form
scissor heaven with their partnering,
and are like another pair–
the eye and point of view–
which knit the world as they loosen
from each other. The intersections glanced
are but another couple on the mind’s
dance floor, too joyed to glimpse
themselves clumsy and off beat.
Pulitzer nominated Ricardo’s poems have appeared (and/or will soon) in Ambit, American Journal of Poetry, American Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, Burnside, The Common, december, Ekphrasis, The Fiddlehead, Hudson Review, Ilanot Review, Island, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Plume, PN Review, Poetry, Prism, Quadrant, Southern Review, Stand, Vayavya, Virginia Quarterly Review, Volt, among many other journals.
