Dan Cuddy

 

Dan Cuddy
is currently an editor of the Loch Raven Review. Most recently he has had poems published in the End of 83, Broadkill Review, Welter, the Twisted Vine Literary Journal, the Pangolin Review and forthcoming in Gargoyle.

 

A Light Poem

Late afternoon sunlight spills
both golden beer
and a bugle playing taps.
The brilliance nestles up
to the dark rich shadows,
toots their obscurity
like death does history.

It is still, in both senses, a winter light,
but it is a sound that will fade,
Miles Davis after the tune has played,
or the brass band all packed, in the bus,
John Philip Sousa a name on a score.

Afterthoughts of snow, ice, stay at the edges,
huddle at the walls of houses or in crevices,
or in the shadow of a large tree or shed.
The cool exhilaration of the afternoon
goes, the leftovers of a meal, cold.

Sublimation means much including sublime,
including the invisible loss of mass, including
the direct sunlight hooking the arms of loose
molecules, and the once white solid world
dissipates like yesterday’s morality, theology,
martial law and other certainties.

Summer light is infected with haze, heat.
Everything blurs. Emotions, desires
lose shadows, sit on porches,
fan themselves asleep. The music is “Golden Oldies”
played for the nth time.
The world snores
as light falls dead into a glass of water.
Desire itches, beads between a mate’s breasts,
begins its trickle down.