Sunday, March 6, 2016

Penumbrae by John Updike

The shadows have their seasons, too. 

The feathery web the budding maples 
cast down upon the sullen lawn

bears but a faint relation to
high summer's umbrageous weight 
and tunnellike continuum—

black leached from green, deep pools 
wherein a globe of gnats revolves 
as airy as an astrolabe.

The thinning shade of autumn is 
an inherited Oriental,
red worn to pink, nap worn to thread.

Shadows on snow look blue. The skier, 
exultant at the summit, sees his poles 
elongate toward the valley: thus

each blade of grass projects another 
opposite the sun, and in marshes 
the mesh is infinite,

as the winged eclipse an eagle in flight 
drags across the desert floor 
is infinitesimal.

And shadows on water!—
the beech bough bent to the speckled lake 
where silt motes flicker gold,

or the steel dock underslung 
with a submarine that trembles, 
its ladder stiffened by air.

And loveliest, because least looked-for, 
gray on gray, the stripes 
the pearl-white winter sun

hung low beneath the leafless wood
draws out from trunk to trunk across the road 
like a stairway that does not rise.

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