Red Letter Poem #270
Summer Dusk
for Lisa and Whitney
The three of us look up
over darkening rooftops,
our eyes six chalices
poised to receive
the sacramental wine of Night.
“A René Magritte sky,”
as it pleases Lisa to call it,
but I can’t remember
a painting of his looking
quite like what’s above us:
stripe of evanescent light
almost reachable by hand,
with here and there a cloud
of muted blue, each one a sigh
offered up to a higher Heaven
who answers by revealing
(shyly at first, then lavishly)
her fathomless trove of stars.
––Thomas DeFreitas
Gentle Reader, I do my best to vary the style, voice, and subject matter of my Red Letter offerings, hoping to both challenge and refresh, to soothe and surprise. I’ve come to regard these electronic pages as ‘a poetry anthology evolving in real time’––and because I’m able to issue these timely installments about fifty times a year, I have the freedom to respond to the temporal, political, and societal weathers we are experiencing together. So after George Kalogeris’ embattled memories of “Tomatoes,” and the angst of last Friday’s “My Bad Day” by Kathleen Aguero, perhaps you too are feeling the need for some literary balm––here, as cherished summer begins to fade in the rearview and the first days of autumn arrive on brisk winds. I have just the thing: Thomas DeFreitas’ rhapsody to the diminuendo of a summer evening and the closeness of friends with whom we might share it.
Even before he specifically mentions “A René Magritte sky,” it was apparent that this is a ‘painterly’ poem, attempting to capture the delicate impression of a simple moment at the close of day. But in these vespers, Thomas blends both his Impressionist and Surrealist impulses. Take lines like “stripe of evanescent light/ almost reachable by hand” (did you, too, feel in your own hand the childlike impulse to reach?); and “with here and there a cloud/ of muted blue, each one a sigh/ offered up to a higher Heaven”: these are lush and romantic descriptives––deep hues of emotion daubed across his canvas. But the Surrealist Magritte himself might admire “our eyes six chalices” (I love the immediacy of the phrase, not even pausing to make room for the verb are). The motion catches up with us, though, and we see just what is about to fill those brimming pupils: “poised to receive/ the sacramental wine of Night.” Ah: deep sigh indeed––whose very purpose is to allow us a moment of real attention so we might appreciate what is moving within us and without. A poet like William Blake might have appreciated that appeal to higher powers (both Night and Heaven accorded those capitalized initials.) Wide-eyed, along with the poet’s close friends, we too await the grand finale of this celestial performance: the revelation of Night’s “fathomless trove of stars.” The relationships are never detailed, but I felt this as a kind of emotional back-pressure, between the lines. If nothing else, it seemed clear to me that without his compatriots to witness this moment together, even Heaven would have been less remarkable.
A true devotee, for whom poetry has long been something like an article of faith, Thomas has been a frequent contributor to the Letters. He has published four poetry collections, all with Kelsay Books, including this year’s Walking Between the Raindrops. A chapbook, Elegies & Devotions is forthcoming. Because he is so conscious of the beloved antecedents we poets rely on––if only as the sturdy foundation upon which our own individual structures may rise––I’ve heard echoes of Blake and Wordsworth in Thomas’s verse as well as Frank O’Hara and Seamus Heaney. Most often, Thomas sets his poems in the urban landscape most of us share; a poem like “Summer Dusk” is about as far removed from the contemporary scene as I’ve read from this poet. I wonder if he (like me, like you) has been feeling so inundated and distressed by the daily upheavals, by the political and cultural ground quaking beneath our feet, he took refuge in an older mood and a cherished memory––a retreat from the bitter demands of 21st-century America. Sometimes we simply need to “get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over” (as another New England bard once suggested.) If so, I’m glad Thomas invited us up to the rooftop along with Lisa and Whitney, to watch a summer day giving way to night. Hopefully, when we all come back down, we’ll feel fortified, ready to cope with whatever the world is about to throw at us.
The Red Letters
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