Shadow

 

Unknown

Shadow

 

Mine is falling beside me, a right-angle

Taking my measure by the slant of the sun.

He sifts through grass, encloses whole beds of flowers,

A masked marvel on the face of disaster:

Being run over or stomped, recklessly climbing

Up cliffs, over railings, floating unfathomably

On water, being flung head under heels

Down rocky slopes where he takes the rough with the smooth 

Like the light denied him, his surrounding absence.

 

We meet underfoot at dawn and stretch

Together, but off he goes incredibly further,

A stilted balancing act, who slowly shrinks,

Hardened by noon, to a circus dwarf,

A macrocephalic, blunt, prognathous partner

Clowning and cloggily nimble, squeezing to nothing

Under me, a hole in my ground, but tossing himself

Away toward distant matters again

In the nimbus of sunset, grimly bony.

 

By nightfall he's gone. The daytime prisoner

Escapes his keeper, completely unhinged

From his obligation to be all things to one man.

But sometimes suddenly leaping out of hiding

Behind my back by firelight, he flickers

With jagged, abrupt abandon

Through bushes and trees, and outsized marauder

Plunging through deeper shadows, threatening

At the edge of sleep to disappear forever.

 

Each morning he slips back with perfect timing

And waits for me to do anything - flop or flounder,

Even race. The end is always a dead heat. 

I'll fall in that dead heat someday, no longer

Insanely predictable, to wait for him

To swivel upright, while a glare of darkness

Dawning beyond a vertical horizon

Cast my light substance - all my light bones

And lighter flesh - into his shadow play.

 

 

David Wagoner

 

This poem but it makes me stutter. Where do I begin? I am too chock with thoughts. It's hard to be coherent. 

Let me list. Herd my jittering thoughts into lines.

1)  The shadow is "taking his measure"! Watching him, eyeing him up, trying to predict what he's going to do next, or what he's about.

2) The shadow does crazy impossible things, defies gravity, floats on water, can't be crushed, flings itself recklessly around.

 3) "A masked marvel on the face of disaster." I picture a manic mini superhero racing toward the cliff-edge.

4) "...the light denied him. His surrounding absence." I like to mull this bit over. The shadow is made of darkness only. How strange! (I realize that even night is a shadow!) And to think that although the shadow can do miraculous things - light destroys it. 

5) And then Wagoner writes of the relationship between himself and his shadow, a kind of waiting on each other. Or that the shadow has the job of "Being all things to one man.."

6) The most fascinating idea in a poem full of ideas is this - if his shadow is made of darkness, is he then made of light?