Gary Lebel
Palms Through a Window
William Faulkner once described the timbre of palm leaves as a ‘wild dry bitter sound against the bright glitter of the water’. How much allure a palm tree holds in its grasp! with a glimpse that unlocks a door behind all others, when the wind that rushes in as it’s opened blows back through the bones and blood as if the soul had blushed.
While leafing through a monograph on Nicolas Poussin and enjoying his extravagant fabrics in orange and red, in the bluest blue, my eye strays to an opening, one of three in the wall behind the many figures. There in the center window of his painting stands a palm in the near distance, a zigzag of white-hot sunlight touching it, a match-lit fuse. With all that is unfolding on the picture’s busy stage, for me there is only that window,
and as I leave the ceremony that’s transpiring there, the fine cloths growing ever more distant as I step back through the swinging gates of my life,
she’s turning four and seeing the ocean for the first time, and the palms sound neither dry nor bitter but sing with the softest of tongues through the salt-laced air, their long sibilant fronds an antiphon for the sea’s green voice as her stout little legs try to copy the blurring wheels of the sanderlings she chases
and outside as a light rain falls tonight and its tire-hiss whispers of an infinite array of paths I might have taken, one out of all the others
held children, a stretch of sand steeped in depths of cerulean that only a curving horizon-line could cleave,
and palms to frame a door through which the future with cradling arms would return our pasts to us as gifts
and now that the ocean’s eve has kissed her eyes asleep,
her body warm as a summer stone,
her spinnakers ballooning with dream
as she lies between us on the bed,
I watch from the hotel window through the last hour of light
as the palms that befriended us all day long turn blue with the smoke of dusk,
and having come full circle
with a French baroque painter living life-long in Rome
and a palm through a window
his apprentice may have painted,
I turn the page.
With the lightest of touches
how quickly taller we grow
beneath the skin,
giants all of us
in the summer wind
Morning Swim montage (c.2013-2014)
About the Author
Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.