NimbusHaloGloryAureole

Recently I heard Henry Taylor's poem "After a Movie" read aloud by Garrison Keillor on his "Writer's Almanac" early-morning radio show. (A few days later I found the book it appears in, Understanding Fiction: Poems, 1986-1996, and had to buy it.) Taylor begins:

               The last small credits fade
 as house lights rise. Dazed in that radiant instant
     of transition, you dwindle through the lobby
     and out to curbside, pulling on a glove
          with the decisive competence
               of the scarred detective

               or his quarry. Scanning
 the rainlit street for taxicabs, you visualize,
     without looking, your image in the window
     of the jeweler's shop, where white hands hover
          above the string of luminous pearls
               on a faceless velvet bust.

... and on --- evoking the magical aura of heightened awareness that one sometimes gets after reading an exceptional story or glimpsing the perfect picture at the perfect moment.

Later in the same poem, Taylor's metaphors of rippling light and water recall lyrical parts of some Counting Crows songs ... and resonate with a haiku that I saw a few decades ago in, believe it or not, an undergraduate physics textbook (Waves --- a volume by Frank S. Crawford in the Berkeley series):

   Brightly colored stones
     Vibrating in the brook-bed ---
   Or the water is.

TopicPoetry - TopicArt - Datetag20011115

(correlates: NightingaleFloor, SemioticArsenal, EternalInstant, ...)