There IS a Time for Looking at the Ground

Let me never not look up again —

But here, right now,
The lake-sand is blue in the clouded midday grey-sky
and the broken reeds are quick and sharp — I must pick my way through them.

So, I step slow, and
Images in the corner of my eye are dreamy, and
True as true —
Pale wood regurgitated by moody Neptune, which Art (she belongs not to Greeks or Romans)
took into her hands and twisted and polished until it gleamed like silver: horses’ heads and
back-bending aquatic things no eye has seen —
I’ve seen them in my mind, though, where it is too deep and dark
for science to reach, also —
those grandchildren of dryads and nymphs: petrified myth.

If I look up now, it will break the spell.
And now it not the time to do so.
In a minute, or an hour; two…a year?

There will be a time. But it is not here.

April 27, 2023, 1110
Jaimie Krycho

Written outside Loyal Coffee, reflecting on a lakeside search(for Chris’s lost lens cap)-turned-poetry walk on a cool spring day