December 2020
Frederick Wilbur
frederickwilbur@gmail.com
Bio Note: The silk screen print described in this poem is hung in my living room between two windows so it often seems like a third, though, of course, it is not like a 'continuous' triptych. It is indicative of the many mountain-originating streams of the Blue Ridge Mountains of central Virginia. My second collection, Conjugation of Perhaps, is available from mainstreetragbookstore.com.

Rapidan River Late Summer, Rapidan River
(a screen print by Frederick Nichols)

	We have rendered nature an easy god to worship. . .
	[except it] is not a temple but a ruin.
	—J B MacKinnon 
 
Hear the squeegee sweep the screen’s silk, 
the inks forced through stencils to leave scraps 
of shape on virgin paper, the white beginning.
 
Frame after frame, like a changing calendar,
colors accumulate layer on layer,
the scene evolves with a certainty of season,
with the accuracy of registration.
.
See the stream babbling blues—
all riffles and pools—that splash into the living 
room as if from a picture window.
That early autumn woodland 
is a pixelated scramble of tragic yellows 
 
and sour greens that camouflages
the vanishing point of an up-stream perspective.
Red-swatched leaves conspire to flutter,
to fall, but there is no breeze to tug them free.
 
And threaded through these flat colors,
black trees are a barcode, a skeleton.
Notice there is no birdsong, lift of air,
no slippery rocks or somber smells of death,
 
but stay a while, with wine and hors d’oeuvres
as if to picnic in that desperate season—that paradise 
you wish for is fast fading in the darkening room.
©2020 Frederick Wilbur
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