Vox Populi
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Sandy Solomon: Pears, Lake, Sun
Pears on a sunlit ledge, flashes of lake,
how the poised world pressed itself
through the floating surface of that day,
how the manifest made its mark.
On the peeling ledge, pears leaned,
speckled, lopsided, more than yellow—
yellow squared—before an open window
through which flared a nosy, fluent breeze.
But would those pears, would that lake beyond them,
struck full of sun, would those images
have stuck so surely all these years without
the stamp of happiness to fix them there?
The proximate cause is gone. The moment stays
through the world’s facts: pears, lake, sun,
become now artifacts seeming finer
than the passing beauty of the world itself.
Even this noon I hold them up to praise
in the face of such brilliant fluidity
now that the eaves let slip their slick icicles
and snow eases again into the ground.
Copyright 1996 Sandy Solomon. From Pears, Lake, Sun (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
Sandy Solomon teaches at Vanderbilt University.
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