A crossing of shadows

A shadow. Something seen so clearly, yet so elusive. Can’t avoid your own shadow unless you step into darkness, becoming one with it.

Magical shadows with special powers, to slide in where a physical body can’t go and do what its owner bids it do. Or shadows that take on their own lives and fight their owners to remain free. Many stories and games include free-spirited, magical shadows, through alchemy of the imagination.

Our earth and moon play shadow games, eclipsing one another from time to time as they perform their celestial dance.

Is an echo an aural shadow? When you hear someone read a poem or play a ballad on piano; also aural shadows? Could a drawing be a shadow image of the artist’s state of mind? What is the taste of something? The flavor of deep chocolate upon the tongue, the fragrance of fresh rain. They only last momentarily, then are memories. Is that shadow? Is the memory of a loved one’s caress a shadow? Is memory sensory shadow?

Shadows are mirror images or stretched-out distortions, combinations of unrecognizable shapes, confusing us all.

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

~ Wallace Stevens