October 3, 2015

Three Poems By Isabel Chenot: ""Foreign Language", "Kite Flying", "On Seeing a Gull's Flight Reflected in a Wave"



Isabel has previously had poetry appear in the Anima poetry journal, on the Atavic poetry site, and on Hedgerows small poems.  She has loved poetry as long as she can remember.  The third poem included was written about visiting a park by Lake Michigan. 






Foreign Language
If I could speak your tongue,
Your scrawls – leaf skeletons —
Would tell your thoughts among
Curious combinations:
Bent lines, squiggles,
Oblong spheres. Or if your words were
Flung over grass, with fragile hulls
Of seeds, I would infer
Autumn. I would look for a symbolic tree
Standing near gaunt, inexplicably
Written on earth’s page, illegibly
Eloquent. I only see
This language,
Trunk-twisted in exquisite
Sentences. Is it a page
Of poetry? — I wish
I knew — discerned your meaning –
Or that my fingers groping, could interpret
Textures out of lines baffling
Significance. Could I regret
Knowing a thing expressed in such
Peculiar beauty? — If hidden thoughts were hung
In crumbling leaves the touch
Of which enabled me to speak your tongue?
~
Kite Flying
I wish my sentences were string, tethering
My typing fingers from which letters spin
To meanings — stretched gauze weathering
The wind — bright tatters crucified to thin
Frames flying with unfastened birds —
Their wings outspread in crosses, like my words.
~
On Seeing a Gull's Flight Reflected in a Wave
I know now what I am: fluidity
Described with grace – shadow of gull
Catching along a wave – beauty
Of mirrored wing along a beautiful
Upsurging twist, broken quickly and lost
In chaos. My blood pounds to my skull:
Motion of waves, pulse and return, the toss
And lull,
While every wingbeat says – your heart is this.
Though many waters thunder in your veins,
Your heart is just a shadow catching its
Own image in the plains
Between the crests, something in flight. Your heart
Is like the bird whose white inverted lift
And ebb hovers above the dart
And drift,
The feather spread and gathering
Of white-tipped water on the margin of
The blood – the body’s fluid shattering
Of the reflected heart’s wingbeats of love.
~Isabel Chenot

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