July 6, 2018

Three Poems by Isabel Chenot: "Engagement to Fly", "Like Rain on the Mown Grass" and I-5 Evening"

Isabel Chenot says she has been "helplessly writing poems and stories since she could form letters and staple pages together into homemade books." She will soon have poems published in Assisi Magazine. Her website is at unevenlines.net.









Engagement to Fly
   (after Kilby)

The flight of God was thus:

Being totally free
With no bar on your motion
Able to fly, uninhibited
By any will not your own --

Flew to a tree,
Were staked there in devotion,
Let yourself be exhibited
Wingless and still as stone.




Like Rain on the Mown Grass

As gentle after snow and ice as rain,
or dew transpired on a stem:
a scent of quenching, and I ascertain
your emanation come

clean around me: the new-mown stubble
has a radiant hue.

Water is a chrysalis to hang heaven on a bruised weed,
so the light can refresh what leans sore after cutting.
The angels whisper peace on earth again

on each blade wounded to break or double:
their clear wings dangle in reflected blue.




I-5, Evening

As I looked back I saw soft golds
and paler marks of pink
above the muffled folds
of a still mountain. Pellucid ink

had scrawled those feathertips
on motionless deepening.
The road behind slips
through a valley, brilliant and weakening.

There while we wandered through,
how it had glowed and spoken. Then it had veiled
its grass and blurred its utterance so
we could pass in our vicissitude. Not that it failed,

like we do. It dimmed, as though to slack
the strain of our elation,
and of our need to move. So I looked back
and saw the mountain mute, that had been revelation.



Isabel Chenot

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