Tag Archives: lament

A year ago today in Center Springs Park,
I photographed a blue heron one-legged perched
oblivious to my intrusion as it’s reflection danced
on green water boiling beneath the morning sun.

I felt you next to me, high on bourbon and
lithium, ranting how the blue heron was secretly
a robot midget pterodactyl too satiated to fly, his
belly full of dragonflies, pollywogs and 9 volt
batteries —

you took flight and later went marching hypomanic
up and down Main Street, talking to ghosts,
channeling John The Baptist blessing all those who would
help you decipher Jacob Cheney’s squiggly black-inked
caricatures born from inbred hoochie coo —

I looked for you … searched for you, and when
hopes of finding you melted into the evening humidity,
a funeral procession rolled past me in a dirge-hum.
I saw you translucent, waiving from the lead hearse,
your smile still impish, your demeanor a forever frantic
invisible man —

when we were young our mother told us a story about the
moon and sun sitting on either end of a seesaw helping to
balance the sky. Our balance was different. I was the sun
steady in the sky, and you were the moon forever shifting
in phase. One couldn’t exist without the other. It’s still
that way. Think me crazy, but somewhere you are the
blue heron, heavy in flight, gliding over the highs and
lumbering through the lows beyond the purple sunset where
the voices fade to hush and this tired photographer aims his
camera for one last picture.

© chuck a stetson 2012