Aubade after a Midnight Bathing Scene

The following is a poem written in mester de clerecia, or cuaderna via (the way of the four,) a style of poetry used by 13th century intellectuals of Castile. This style of poetry consists of four-line stanzas of alexandrines. A conventional alexandrine consists of rhymed verses of six iambic feet. A more detailed research indicates that an alexandrine has seven iambic feet. To split the difference I chose to create a work with eight syllabic measures in the line prior to a caesura, followed with six syllables to the end the line.

Aubade after a Midnight Bathing Scene

Last night my garden must have been tossed in diamond dust,
lost it seemed beneath a sheen of glazed and frozen crust.
A sleepy palm of day had wiped the dark away unwrapping
sheets of freshly laundered sky that hung in folds and trapping

dawn. Through frosted windowpanes in dreams or half awake
the silence palpitates below the furrows of each drifting flake
that falls upon my still closed eyes. And thin blue flames of ice
are stars that fell and bloomed in my back yard or peonies twice

caught in nets of grass are but spilled clouds of pale and sifted
passing thoughts afloat and like some drunken angel drifted
off in slumber. In this stiff and shining air that hovers
just behind late evening's veil of slipping silver covers,

midnight's moon-swept bathing scene delights a crowded grove
bent low in iced anticipated glow. And roses move
in bundles blown in rings of rubies careless thrown about
the ground and watching too for morning's song to sprout

in warming leaves of daylight tucked and pressed away to stay
the night. As though they might by some sleeping vow allay
aged petals dropping in attendant garden rows of seams
portray a never ending wash of light between flawed dreams.