Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist (Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Comstock Review, Clementine Unbound, The Non-Conformist Magazine, SORTES, New Contrast Expanded Field, pending in Lunaris, Fleas on the Dog. Short-listed in 2009 for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book of poetry: The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson was published by Adelaide Book in 2020. The poetry book Anaho is pending publication with Arteidolia Press, NY.
The garden twinkles with swards of sea
Breaching through the oaks: Bleu Roi.
Inspired summer suddenly deploys
A squad of butteflies japonisant,
Dark with gilt edges. They glide big
Like eagles along the black smell of bark,
Changing the scale of things.
Palatial flight builds stairway, ballroom.
They till shadows into infinite arcades
When afternoon delivers its gold ransom.
They fly in dilemmas of pleasure,
Courting shade ponds, sun fields.
Nothing to them, the hour’s alchemy,
That turns them to onyx set in platinum,
A single ruby dropped on their back.
By their cursive grace
Mimosa, oleander, cork tree webbed
With fairytale.
There they go
Venturing seaward by immortal whim
Where they surf or succumb.
A Mediterranean table
This territory of mine savors a summer afternoon,
a minuet of shade and sun,
the smiling heat of pale blue gauze
speckled with pink petals
that suggest a cool deliberation.
Now there is such a thing.
Inoculated light places halos
over the muteness of substance.
All journeys come to sit at the round table
carved and planed to a sheen
that I liken to a horse’s coat
groomed for victory.
Nearby a window of colored glass
paints the polish with rifts,
dawns, waves, parrotfish
and distills the lily smell of wings.
In the whirls and knots takes shape a map
with boundaries lost to Terra Amnesia.
Already there is more to see.
Of cognition the two known stages:
disgust and despair, have melted from the chart.
The presence in absence whistles
an enticing tune in my ears.
Distances are not what I thought.
The antique table keeps its old style
of still being here,
pulling futures from the jaws of death
like dragon teeth from a quest.
A sun beam embalms the wood
in agelessness.
Antiquity
Pines black with evening
return to this same hour
ever shadows of themselves
in Odyssey’s lengthening twilight.
Artful immortality devises a language
common to the still ether of Olympus
and the tempo of the cicada.
The long-necked pines take off
in flocks from the cliff
in tandem with the cormorants.
The cove uncovers depths of transparency
wise with lucid flashes from
mullet schools that foresee
a kingfisher’s dive.
Acrobatic swallows sharpen the air
slicing out paths
between above and below.
Sounding, then anchoring,
pirate winds quiet down
and dissolve in the Circean haven.
Poetry in this post: © Stephanie V Sears
Published with the permission of Stephanie V Sears