far

Poetry

Looking

Julia Bucci
issue five

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Lilacs stir light shadows
across evening grass.
A woman snips pink rosebushes
along a white fence.
She twists dried blossoms,
cuts away inward-facing limbs.

Piano notes through an open window
blend with cicadas’ raised rasps.
A boy practices piano briskly,
moving his own wings on a hidden branch.
The sounds merge like trains on different tracks.

A girl sits on the grass
deciding between purple and white.
She pets a gray cat
covered in battle scars.
He kneads the girl’s
arm, his purr a growl, his
yellow eyes looking through her,
transfixed by invisible events.

They say lilacs thrive on neglect,
but it’s not neglect, exactly, to grow
when no one is looking.

A stone walkway winds through the grass
and leads to an alley that ends at a train.
One winter, the stones glitter
under the white moon as a man
walks out at midnight
in a brown hat and coat,
a briefcase filled with music,
a silver flask in his pocket,
the future muffling his long steps.

I want to conjure him today, but
I can’t break my habit of noticing
beautiful things after great pain,
always superimposing.
When I think of a man drifting away
like sheet music tossed from a piano,
when I look for horn-rimmed glasses
in a blurred train window, I see instead

a woman carrying cut roses into a house.
I watch a girl lift a heavy cat
in both her arms, carefully,
as if he’d just been born.
I hear a sonata of insects.

Purple lilacs are beautiful in the day,
but in the evening, the white lilacs glow.