quiescent: adjective – 1. marked by inactivity or repose: tranquilly at rest; dormancy 2. causing no trouble or symptoms (as in gallstones).

Today is not a letter day for the A to Z Challenge (tomorrow is T). I added an extra Q because I just finished reading Requiem, Mass.: A Novel by John Dufresne, and on the very last page of the book he wrote, “When I think of that drive, I see the chromium Quark as if from above, see it picking up speed as I shift the engine into quiescent mode, and we drive on deep, deep into our shiny futures.” There is a lot about that book that stood out and will probably stick with me, but right now I’m pretty focused on; why did he choose that word? What part of the shift is quiescent mode? Is the car like a gallstone, or somehow moving while in idle?

Rising In The West

Emerging to a collective gasp
Surrounded by a held breath
Frisson holds me in awkward stasis
Each saccade assiduous and susurrus
Eldritch shadows creep across the lawn
An augur of a world off its axis

I ponder this celestial whim
A quondam certainty of Eastern rise
The halcyon yesterdays when the tall firs
Blocked the blinding glare

Now a day is but a panoply of daylight
Scattered to disarray
My view a palimpsest shocked
By hypotyposis

Do not importune the sun
To mend its path to comfort
Do not offer opprobrium
To shame a ball of fire to your convenience
But observe quiescent each degree of light
And embrace the elysian mystery

Continuing with the NaPoWriMo theme of facing the impossible you may want to look at:

Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible (Liverpool University Press – Poetry and . . .) by Peter Robinson

Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787-1802 by Gerald N. Izenberg

Happy Reading and Writing!