Anticlockwise

Isn’t it strange how things unravel anticlockwise in the
night, as if thoughts, blindfolded, spiral homeward into

the past? In the morning, even in the half-glow of dawn,
you can float away from yourself, changing their direction,

the end of the trembling dark clutched tight in your hand,
deliberately unwinding pain through a labyrinth of forced

possibilities. Time, then, is just a cruel trick of the light.
Or maybe, love is. I remember lying on our backs on the

sand, the sky close, beginning at the end of our skin,
stars finding the hollows under our nails, clouds moving

in dextral whorls around a proximate moon. Or maybe we
were just looking at it wrong. Maybe it was day. Maybe it

was us whirling and there was one nebulous cloud in the
centre blurring the sun. Maybe we weren’t next to each

other, a deception of trajectory and distance and touch,
the twisted path a long way to reach an inevitable end.

 

VisVerse

Image by Anthony Jon Tyson (Picture prompt provided by Visual Verse)
First published on Visual Verse (Vol 05, Chapter 10)

39 thoughts on “Anticlockwise

  1. Your wordplay and imagery is a delight in this one. I’m enchanted by thought the sky “beginning at the end of our skin”. And love maybe being “a trick of the light” sounds like the beginning of a fantastic story.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. “Or maybe we
    were just looking at it wrong. Maybe it was day. Maybe . . . ”
    Possibilities “gaslight” us when we know we have been side by side, skin touching, on our backs looking up! How can we stop letting illusion and absence convince us of unreality? How can we stop time at the peak of the story?

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  3. Our end IS inevitable, and the pathway is indeed often twisted and crooked. But what good would it do to merely sit by the path and wait?

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  4. Time travel is a lot more possible in that state between waking and sleeping. Though the perspective of our present selves cannot contact our past directly, no matter how much we wish we would. Nicely done piece on those nighttime regrets that plague us.

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  5. Such a special poem — the images and trajectories of time and movement and proximity make this vortex all too familiar, even if it stays as puzzling as ever. There are so many beautifully worded phrases here, that it is difficult to pick any one of them.
    I particularly loved this bit: “stars finding the hollows under our nails, clouds moving/in dextral whorls around a proximate moon”.
    -HA

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Poets are weavers, and you are an inspiration to us all. Its compact and watery and in love and long lost. I read the other day that Japanese philosophy founds on the idea that thoughts that bend back and down into our deep history. The landscape is misty for that. So too our minds, fast in desire, slow in acceptance. Well done …

    Liked by 2 people

  7. I love this, Rajani, and saw it on Visual Verse! Anticlockwise, or widdershins, is magic, as is your poem.I like the ideas that ‘thoughts, blindfolded, spiral homeward into the past’ and time ‘is just a cruel trick of the light. / Or maybe, love is’.

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