Gary LeBel
Balance
And we shall pass,
And shall not come again
—Thomas Wolfe, O Lost
The bonfire blazes, the tide is rising, stars burn away in their infinite spaces: every firelit face is young. The inlet’s marshes pervade the summer night’s air with a thick and heady brackishness:
clutching blindly at reeds for balance, we wade out into the currents slowly, step by step, sinking past our ankles into its plush, yielding mud,
and after bathing, dry off by the fire, skin-shine in firelight, backs and bellies clotted with ropes of gluten and silt, both sky and the waters beyond the fire’s reach
as black as a stallion’s midnight eye…
but now the old path is gone, its trampled grass having risen like Lazarus long ago to sprout into a breezy coppice,
yet still the inlet waits for the curious to find their way there, having offered a telltale flash of blue through its shielding trees.
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.