Whispering Images

Mementos find temporary home on my desk,

Photos, pictures, shards of writing.

They linger before yielding to replacements

Three have stayed on and I ponder:

What in them keeps me keeping them?

A brown dog on a high chain link fence

Hind legs holding him up, head high,

One paw lying lazily on the top rail.

It’s nothing to go all the way over.

His choice and he wants us to know it.

Mstislav Rostropovich, sitting in a borrowed chair,

Plays Bach below the doomed Berlin wall

He left home when his art was idolized

Yet ideas and his voice suppressed,

He and Bach return when they can breathe again.

A miniature oil of a lake in Siberian summer,

Blue sky, white clouds, greening birches.

The longer I look the more it expands.

In one corner ripples coalesce into a face

And something mysterious is coming ashore.

“You can’t fence me in”, barks the dog.

“Beauty transcends ugliness”, sings the cello.

“You know me, but you don’t”, murmurs nature.

True? Or do I imagine thoughts already in me?

My eyes and my heart explore the conundrum.

Charles B. Neff

February 1, 2014