"Brancusi's Ghost" Nick Pici

Brancusi's Ghost

From winter winds I feel the rush
of emptiness around --
implanting all these swirling thoughts
in tensely ordered grounds.

A twilight sheen lights up the snow
that sleeps upon the world,
upon the branches bare like bone
of trees once standing full,

on river banks that hold the blood
still cutting through the cold --
despite the bleak and frozen land
that hides beneath the white mask.

In the snowcover -- I stagger --
highstepping through the park,
and I can feel the cold sharpness
down into my recesses.

But then I know that you're there too,
clumsy right beside me
in the embittered air, and that there's strength
in silence. Silence that

recalls Tuscan hills in the spring
when we first became friends.
(I wonder then if you know how
I hope there is more.)

So I invoke Brancusi's ghost
to join our white-dusk walk
and carve one of his sculpture blocks
this time of flesh, not stone.

We come upon a rock, clear it
so we can sit. Listen
to river blood as the scent of
late leaves burning surrounds.

I focus hard but as you talk
I gaze into the snow:
hoping hard for a kiss that will
melt winter -- briefly -- away.

© Nick Pici, all rights reserved
appears here by permission

Author Notes

Written in a progressively deteriorating ballad form, "Brancusi's Ghost" deals with existential angst, romantic longing, the discrepancies between inner thought and outer expression, and the opposition between order and disorder, reason and intuition.

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