P. K. Page

Remembering you and reviewing our structural love the past re-arises alive from its smothering dust. For memory, which is only decadent in hands like a miser’s loving the thing for its thingness, or in the eyes of collectors who assess the size, the incredible size, of their collection, can, in the living head, create and make new the sometimes appallingly ancient present and sting the sleeping thing to a sudden seeing. And as a tree with all its leaves relaxed can shiver at the memory of wind or the still waters of a pool recall their springing origin and rise and fall suddenly over the encircling basin’s lip— so I, remembering from now to then, can know and see and feel again, as jewels must when held in a brilliant branch of sun.

Intractable between them grows a garden of barbed wire and roses. Burning briars like flames devour their too innocent attire. Dare they meet, the blackened wire tears the intervening air. Trespassers have wandered through texture of flesh and petals. Dogs like arrows moved along pathways that their noses knew. While the two who laid it out find the metal and the flower fatal underfoot. Black and white at midnight glows this garden of barbed wire and roses. Doused with darkness roses burn coolly as a rainy moon: beneath a rainy moon or none silver the sheath on barb and thorn. Change the garden, scale and plan; wall it, make it annual. There the briary flower grew. There the brambled wire ran. While they sleep the garden grows, deepest wish annuls the will: perfect still the wire and rose.

His clumsy body is a golden fruit pendulous in the pear tree Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds Adriatic blue the sky above and through the forking twigs Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk his massive head thick-nobbed with burnished curls tight-clenched in bud (Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.) I watch him prune with silent secateurs Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight heavily as oxen in a stall Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth a kitten in a box Pear clippings fall soundlessly on the ground Spring finches sing soundlessly in the leaves A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s quick springtime pulse Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on his mutely snipping blades and flags and scraps of blue above him make regatta of the day But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape sudden and silent in the grass below uptilt its face to him then air is kisses, kisses stone dissolves his locked throat finds a little door and through it feathered joy flies screaming like a jay

He found it strange at first. A new dimension. One he had never guessed. The fourth? The fifth? How could he tell, who’d only known the third? Something to do with eyesight, depth of field. Perspective quite beyond him. Everything flat or nearly flat. The vanishing point they’d tried to teach at school was out of sight and out of mind. A blank. Now, this diaphanous dimension—one with neither up nor down, nor east nor west, nor orienting star to give him north. Even his name had left him. Strayed like a dog. Yet he was bathed in some unearthly light, a delicate no-color that made his flesh transparent, see-through, a Saran-Wrap self. His body without substance and his mind with nothing to think about—although intact— was totally minus purpose. He must