Art Curtis
Pursuit
I wait for the moon to set, my eyes to adjust, recalcitrant clouds to move eastward. I ache for the aurora they would not let me see, for the North Star. I pine for Polar Regions—imagine colors of excited electrons reflecting on the snow and ice as I listen to the static of unseen borealis, short waves that crackle at the left end of the dial of the old Garrard radio in my parent’s basement.
Tomorrow, clouds gone, I’ll map the source of the spectacle, the position of sunspots that appear as tiny specks on white cardboard projection screen affixed to lens of an A. C. Gilbert telescope.
I am young, headed for 8th grade. It’s the International Geophysical Year. I’m excited. Everything interests me.
Now, 80, my years nearly over, my interests bear down on me. They call to me—want attention. I don’t know which to pursue first. Darkness pursues me.
rainbow bridge—
frosted glass
over Monet’s pond.
About the Author
Art Curtis’s poetry has appeared in Dunes Review, Peninsula Poets, Walloon Writers Review, UP Reader and TADL: Poets’ Night Out. He is busy finishing Letters to Harrison, a non-fiction epistolary honoring Michigan writer Jim Harrison. Art lives near Bellaire, Michigan, with his cat, Mr. Strider, and finds Petoskey stones in his sandy garden nearly 400′ above Lake Michigan.