Two poems by David Vincenti

A Kite In Winter

for Jaclyn

How she longs to be the welcome interruption,
the eye-catching exception in a world of blue.

How she wants to contradict continuity,
to trace a tethered track answering only

to the one who loves her deeply enough
to unravel string with gloveless hands,

to let her out long into a cloudless sky
that loves her more than warmth, more than

the seasons, more than home. How she longs
to return that love with one perfect flight.

 

 

Red Shift

Red Shift is an increase in apparent wave length, caused by the movement of a source away from the observer. The phenomenon causes light to appear redder and sound to have a lower pitch. The opposite, Blue Shift, occurs when the source is moving toward.

 
It may have been that morning by the lake
when you realized you’d rather row than swim,
but the shore was so still, so free of birdsong,
that surely you think you’d have heard the turn,
felt the mosquito touch of passing time,
sensed a change in pressure. The years rush
toward you for so long then start to rush away
and you still produce the same sounds but
they strike the world differently than they do
your own stationary receiver. From within
a new confluence of volume and flash,
like a Stones concert whose hangovers
you can no longer stand, someone produces
a signal more sturdy than your own fallible voice
carrying this choice: stretch to a new note
or trust the echo as your song deepens
and fades, soundtrack of the reddening sunset

 

David Vincenti (www.davidvincenti.com) is a father, husband, lector, engineer, project manager, accordionist and bowler whose poems have appeared in numerous journals including Schuylkill Valley Journal, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and the anthologies Rabbit Ears: TV Poems and Meta-Land, Poets of the Palisades II. He has authored two collections: To The Ones Who Must Be Loved (2010) and A Measure of this World: Galileo’s Dialog with the Universe (2015).