Today is a sonnet

Our joint history falls into the long loose ribbons of a day’s
cumulus and a riverbank’s trees laid over water, the doubling
of summer’s arrival in all of its sky and limbs, cast out and longways
into reflections, the flow of time freighted glass-like and carrying
years across the water’s surface, in the bindings of its meniscus:
our days floating themselves in the stream of its silken settling—
when a river’s span of down feathers comes right by us, upturned as
white-tufted, small-cupped boats, taking us downriver, pointing onwards
with their light calamus prows of barbule-fluff, from upriver where perhaps
the waterfowl have been gathering for the year’s one-time ‘big moult’
of their body’s closest covering they drop first, soft and spectacular;
towards what arrives soon enough with this new season. Optimistically,
I stand and look out at everything we have seen and done together
as it sails with this afternoon’s event, in a plumulaceous flotilla.

ξ

“Today is a Sonnet” was first published in Poetry Salzburg Review, No. 36, Winter 2020.

Jodie Dalgleish is a writer, curator and sound artist based in Luxembourg. After a decade of exhibition making for public art galleries in New Zealand, she writes to explore ways in which sensorial experience might be embodied by language. Her poetry has been published in Landfall and Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook (NZ); Shearsman and Long Poem Magazine (UK); Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria); Azure (USA) and Les Cahiers Luxembourgeois (Luxembourg). She holds a Master of Creative Writing from AUT University (NZ).

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