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  • Meditation on the I Ching, Hexagrams 2 & 43, and: Fire
  • Holaday Mason (bio)

Meditation on the I Ching, Hexagrams 2 & 43

For LW

It was always as if someone were watching—

like a mare, in placid field.Yet, it was always … just me.

Fog smears the nearly full moon.

I reach up throughthree black branches

& three pale petalsundone by my touch,drift to earth—

but first caress my face.

Was I so careless, demons always

at the edges, impossible

to still—like weeds?

Such an effort to keep thingsmanicured—

The frog pond is an opera—the murky dank of eucalyptus, huge. [End Page 106]

You can’t make someonespeak who does not want to.

& silence has its bells—

one each minute, hour, in octaves

you must discern.

Everything will eventually arrive.

Eventually, a squeaky bike at dawn,

the rider bent & focused as a snake.

Eventually, one hot blood roseknocking on the door of sky.

In due time, a small girlwashing her hands at a coiled garden hose—the water, oblivious & calm.

Bells. Bells.

What to do with these restless hands?

My windows open to islands far off.

I am watching you, you red morning birds,am standing here just as naked.

In this simple light,that sole blooming tree snowsas softly as a good night’s sleep.

It is a prayer. [End Page 107]

Fire

You never expected her to burst naked, flying from the tree        & not a neon billboard in sight to direct youso you must stay the course of nocturnal beauty.~The back of a running doe is a wave        threading through high grass—exactly the way the woman’sspine is, as each minute is & you want the whole~pale length of her, from crown to cave—her skin sheet        a sail beneath which all else is shadow—shadow bodies everywhere, waiting to meet—but you knew that.~And, much the way the doe remains forever standing in the road—        such is the woman’s slow-motion leapas if from a fire, those dried leaves, amber confetti,~dripping into the dark around her bodywhile the unmade bed of her redhair swells then nearly sweeps the broken yellow lines~ [End Page 108] of the highway where you stand so far below. She reaches        farther & harder than you could everbear, her might in the tips of fingers saturated~with what, you don’t know, but your body does        because it feels her body flinging out betweenthe ground & the sky, a pale weaver suspended~& not a single hint of starlight—no, she alone cuts her own white country open.

—based on a photograph by Ryan McGinley [End Page 109]

Holaday Mason

Holaday Mason is author of The Red Bowl: A Fable in Poems (2016), The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence (with Sarah Maclay, 2016), Towards the Forest (2007), Dissolve (2011), and two chapbooks: “The Weaver’s Body,” which was a finalist with honorable mention for the 2014 Dorset Prize, and “Transparency,” which was a finalist for the Snowbound 2015. She has also twice been a Pushcart nominee. Mason is coeditor of Echo 68, poetry editor of Mentalshoes.com, and also a fine art photographer and a psychotherapist since 1996. www.holadaymason.com

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