The Modern Sublime
by Ever K. Blaine-Johnson
White Mountains
White mountains blink in and out of sleep,
Hung upside-down in bowls of opaline glass.
They slip between the ribs of what must pass,
Like teeth that dream of snow but never keep.A thread unwinds itself from somewhere deep—
Montivagant obscured from human sight,
Of names never wore, of shattering cold light,
Dissolving through the seams of what I keep.A sky without beginning pulls apart,
It weeps in forms the sun can’t translate.
Their meaning flickers, fails to imitate,
The hush of snow that buries every part.I was a shape—and so I slipped the net.
A cloud becomes the only mark I left.
Inheritance
They call me pretty that part isn’t wrong,
my jaw is smooth my lashes cast their spells.
I’ve watched their eyes get lost before too long,
unsure of where my name or body dwells.She laughed and said I looked just like a hare,
some harmless thing with limbs too slight to break.
I smiled because she meant it as a care,
but some soft ache still settled in its wake.Yes I am a boy, this face is not a trick
These lips unasked for, curl in their own bloom.
My voice stays gentle even when it’s sick;
no muscle makes it echo through the room.“You’re gorgeous,” someone says. I nearly flinch.
“Thanks,” I say. A beat. “You want these lips?”Called me handsome once and I almost wept.
The mirror never learned what her words meant.
Pilgrimage
In dreary mist of November’s tender rot,
When hollow woods grow thick with shades of night,
And low clouds brood above a world forgot,
I wander out a pilgrim drawn to light.I seek what lingers when all else decays:
The truth that waits beneath the heart’s unrest,
A sudden gleam that cuts the gauze of days,
And lifts the soul like fire within the chest.Yet all I pass is trembling thin and brief—
A painted veil, a dream that drifts and dies,
Where joy and sorrow blur beyond belief,
And nothing holds beneath the shrouded skies.Still do I seek, though shadows stretch and slide—
For in the hush of earth I find my pride.
Song of Crane
Like wilting green in ancient desert sands,
Her warmth arrives and crowns my brow with flame.
I reach through gold with open trembling hands—
Some spirit stirs and softly speaks her name.Her breath is fire upon the hallowed ground,
Her steps leave embers glowing where they fall.
White doves are loosed by every softened sound,
Her voice a wind that sanctifies it all.Threads of desire slip past the sunstruck brow,
Each golden strand beguiled in the breeze.
I stand undone, unbodied by her vow,
My soul bent low in wordless fervent pleas.Tuned to the brightness in her warmth confessed,
Her voice— a stream that floods my hollow chest.
The Lake
I.
Now comes dusk with whispering decay,
And russet leaves drift down in solemn grace.
A man and shadow, both slow and silver-gray,
Descend once more unto their solemn place.The lake receives them like a chapel door,
Its breathless frigid hush before a psalm.
What aches is eased by entering once more,
And something bends, released from time and place.The watcher lingers, hands held loose and low,
His gaze not fixed on sky, but on the gleam
That shivers where the fading grasses grow,
Half lost in water, half recalled in dream.Yet in the hush, the lake becomes a hymn:
Not mourning yet but frozen at the rim.II.
Not mourning yet but frozen at the rim,
The world lies steadfast under breathless glaze.
Bare branches scratch the edge of daylight dim,
And frost replaces what the lake once gave.No cry, no step, nor shadow on the shore—
The path is blank beneath a sky untied.
A shape once formed returns to form no more;
It sinks where hush and water coincide.The watcher waits as if the scene might shift,
As if the air still holds some final sound.
But nothing stirs, not even wind can lift
the softened edge where loss has warped the ground.The cold reflects and offers no reply:
A perfect stillness underneath the sky.III.
A perfect stillness underneath the sky
Gives way to sound, the Blackbird tests its song.
Beneath the frost, crushed violets faintly lie
Awaiting warmth, though bright cold still lingers long.A leash still hangs beside the door untouched,
No hand to lift it with familiar weight.
Your bowl gone dry and cushion left unsmudged
Each sign preserved, as if love outwaits fate.The watcher dreams in flickers, half-awake,
Of fur turned gold beneath a younger sun,
Of pawprints pressed along the thawing lake,
Then lost again where our waters run.No presence comes, yet nothing feels quite gone,
Some part of grief begins to carry on.IV.
Some part of grief begins to carry on,
Not as it was but softened by the sun.
The air is thick with scent, meadows are drawn
In lines of gold the lake absorbs as one.The path returns, though none will take its turn,
And all was quiet when the voices passed.
Yet in the hush, our grasses seem to learn
To sway once more for those who walked them last.The watcher leans where shade and brightness nest,
And feels no need to call, or rise and speak.
What once was pain now settles in the chest—
A warmth made whole by all it does not seek.I kneel once more where sky and stillness break
and drift at last— like an old dog in a cold lake.
Ode to the Late Afternoon
O hour of slant-light and sun-wilted hush,
When sidewalks shimmer with what might have been.
You drape the day in gold and quiet blush,
A gauze for all the hours that failed to win.
The breeze forgets itself, the windows lean,
And even trees seem softened at the seam.Noon held its breath too long, and now you come
to stretch each shadow down the length of lot.
Nothing begins with you, and yet you hum
Of something ending—just not what we’re taught.
You crease the edges where the moments slow,
And time moves through you, warm and low.No bells announce you, no one calls you out.
You arrive sideways, in the minor key
A hallway’s hush, the pause before the shout,
A lamp turned on too early, absently
You pass without the need to make a claim,
And leave behind a hush too still to name.
Ode to a Flickering Light
O hesitant flame so uncertain in your claim,
You are no sun nor sovereign of the day.
Your shimmer speaks not conquest but a name,
Whispered and wavering then pulled away.You do not press yourself on stone or wall,
Nor mark the hour with brass or steady glow.
Instead you pause and flinch, you nearly fall,
a light unsure if it would rather go.And yet you linger where the shadows pool,
Half-thoughts retreating in your amber sigh.
The room becomes a threshold, dim and cool
a hush that stretches just before a final goodbye.You light no task nor letter to be read,
No face prepared to weep or page to turn.
You hover near the quiet of the dead,
A warmth too faint to touch yet still to yearn.What faith resides in this fluttering light?
Not in the blaze but in the near-extinct,
Where silence walks the border of the night
and steady things are suddenly unlinked.O flicker! Frail companion of the lost
You do not guide, we only watch you stay.
And that is grace: not clarity, not cost,
But something lit that does not look away.You do not burn to change or to be known,
But hold to the hour where nothing stands alone.
Ode to the Idea
O breath before the breath, O still unshaped
You enter not by force but by suggestion.
You are no guest, nor god to be escaped
but flicker—soft as pause before a question.You arrive where names have not yet formed,
Where silence presses gently into mind.
Not spoken not quite dreamt, not yet adorned
You hum in matter though you have yet to find.You split the sky inside the self’s closed eye,
A shimmer through the marrow of a pause.
No trumpet calls, no clarity or cry
You are the wailing breath before applause.O strange companion of the crudely-lit soul,
You echo through the scaffolds of intent.
You haunt the outline fill the fractured whole,
Unclaimed by time, directionless and unspent.No blade could trim your edges into use,
No mouth reduces your marrow into speech.
You do not pass, dissolve, declare, deduce
but stretch just out of meaning’s furthest reach.You flicker in the voice not yet released,
A rhythm in the fingers left unwrote.
Not silence, no, but not quite sound or feast.
A gesture caught mid-air, an offered note.What are you, if not “failure in disguise?”
Yet I have chased you like a pilgrim flame.
I’ve knelt before your fragments closed my eyes,
And prayed to vanish underneath your name.O keeper of the open, slow and slight,
You make a dwelling of the yet-to-be.
Not progress, no nor even insight, right?
Just nearness folded soft around the free.And if I never speak you into form,
If I remain a vessel for your weight
Would that not still be grace enough to warm
The dark and say: I waited, I was late.You are not mine. You never have to stay.
You are not kin, not a cure, not a useful ghost.
You are the hour that won’t resolve to day,
The shape that almost fits but misses most.Yet still I love you vague and half-contained
An Unruly muse that stirs and won’t obey.
You wreck the lines I thought that I had trained,
Then vanish, nodding kindly on your way.O unkept promise, sweet unfinished thread
You teach me how to linger, not to hold.
No metaphor can map where you have led,
But still I go and feel your quiet bold.I do not want you shaped or clarified.
I do not want you clean or made precise.
I only want to stand here open-eyed,
And feel you pass, elusive, vague, and wise.
Elegy for a Field at Dusk
You were never mine but I returned to you.
The earth had pulled its heat back from the grass,
and the wind arrived not loud, but long overdue.
a breath that made no promise it would pass.The sky was violet, not for beauty’s sake
but out of some exhaustive need to dim.
The fences slouched. The goldenrod would break
if touched. The light withdrew from every limb.I never ran through you as children do.
I never learned the names of what you held.
But I recall one broken gate askew,
and someone humming softly where it swelled.Your quiet was not peace, but something old
a long forgetting, emptied out and slow,
The kind of silence that turns dusk to gold.
Just long enough to make us want to go.And somewhere past the hedgerow’s dark divide,
a bird began to sing what could not stay,
a song that was not meant for death or pride,
but born from how we vanish day by day.Now every summer ends with your still sound.
The bees went dumb. The orchard breathing out.
I leave no print or gesture on your grounds,
just pause a while and try to do without.You do not miss me. Fields are not like men.
You never held me and I left no mark.
But when I ache I see you once again;
somewhere between the stillness and the dark.
To Worship What One Cannot Reach
A Poem Inspired by “Ode to a Nightingale”
The song drifts where I cannot follow,
weightless, beyond the reach of handsA prayer with nothing to receive
but it sings without waiting,
unknowing and never fading
I offer silence and reprieve,longing is not to lose, nor thirst in vain
beauty lives where questions still remain.