Poem for Sunday and Bellevue Parks

This Blue Vase 

By Peter Campion 

shows more than the morning clarities

of sun through leaves than through these windows.

Each thing is imbued by others. And staring

at the convex glass, I see the falls

in the one picture that held me enthralled

while you walked on through the gallery.

Even back then I must have felt

the photograph’s stark black and white

trapping the glow off tons of water

in its whole minute of exposure

one hundred years before we were born

as weirdly relevant: how barns

and long gone houses’ clapboard sides

above where shadowed cliff-face slid

vertiginously toward the falls

reflected all my naïve bewilderment

seeing what I’d thought permanent

turn so starkly half unreal.

But this morning, watching sunlight steal

across this table’s lacquered pine,

I still sense, through the smallest glints,

your presence still fusing all I see with you.

Blue irises from this vase’s blue.

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We had lovely cooler weather on Sunday, so after some morning chores and the Orioles game, which did not end well, we went to Bellevue. We had a couple of shopping stops to make, but first we went to Kelsey Creek Farm to see the animals and walk around the trail by the salmon stream, then we went to Bellevue Botanical Garden to see the summer flowers and the low water under the ravine bridge.

 

We saw the Mariners game, which went much better than the Orioles game (Cal Raleigh!), then a bit of the Olympics closing ceremony, but I'm so pissed about what the IOC did to Jordan Chiles that I wasn't in the mood. Instead we watched this week's Snowpiercer (good, but I'm missing Melanie and Wilford) and Orphan Black: Echoes (love the age-separated Eleanors but wish the endgame were clearer).