763 | Gibraltar Not Gibraltar

Painting by Lo Ch’ing 

Gibraltar Not Gibraltar

– after Lo Ch’ing’s painting, “Post-Industrial Society Has Arrived”

Over the mountaintop pavilion,
under which I imagine you asleep,
the crescent moon waxes.

The sun casts vermilion and

neither of us would’ve been correct
in supposing rising or falling.

Skyward, eternal, those
two orbs and true north.  We
mis-see what our minds upend.

Green is for life, so what
I look at and what I see is just
crooked trunks of pine trees.

You are parcel of land, white sky,
the blue lake reflecting high-rises
in which we, undivided, once lived.

Shall I scale the mountain,
step out under the sun, or slip
into water to tempt you back?

The deft lake reflects a thing
whose proxy has more meaning
than the thing itself.  Who am I now?

Janée J. Baugher (USA)