39 Flower poems

Thou blossom bright with autumn dew, And colored with the heaven’s own blue, That openest when the quiet light Succeeds the keen and frosty night. Thou comest not when violets lean O’er wandering brooks and springs unseen, Or columbines, in purple dressed, Nod o’er the ground-bird’s hidden nest. Thou waitest late and com’st alone, When woods are bare and birds are flown, And frosts and shortening days portend The aged year is near his end. Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye Look through its fringes to the sky, Blue-blue-as if that sky let fall A flower from its cerulean wall. I would that thus, when I shall see The hour of death draw near to me, Hope, blossoming within my heart, May look to heaven as I depart.

O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

I Weed, moss-weed, root tangled in sand, sea-iris, brittle flower, one petal like a shell is broken, and you print a shadow like a thin twig. Fortunate one, scented and stinging, rigid myrrh-bud, camphor-flower, sweet and salt—you are wind in our nostrils. II Do the murex-fishers drench you as they pass? Do your roots drag up colour from the sand? Have they slipped gold under you— rivets of gold? Band of iris-flowers above the waves, you are painted blue, painted like a fresh prow stained among the salt weeds.

Amber husk fluted with gold, fruit on the sand marked with a rich grain, treasure spilled near the shrub-pines to bleach on the boulders: your stalk has caught root among wet pebbles and drift flung by the sea and grated shells and split conch-shells. Beautiful, wide-spread, fire upon leaf, what meadow yields so fragrant a leaf as your bright leaf?

Rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals, meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf, more precious than a wet rose single on a stem— you are caught in the drift. Stunted, with small leaf, you are flung on the sand, you are lifted in the crisp sand that drives in the wind. Can the spice-rose drip such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf?

I’ve sent my empty pot again To beg another slip; The last you gave, I’m grieved to tell December’s frost did nip. I love fair Flora and her train But nurse her children ill; I tend too little, or too much; They die from want of skill. I blush to trouble you again, Who’ve served me oft before; But, should this die, I’ll break the pot, And trouble you no more.

That linkage of warnings sent a tremor through June as if to prepare October in the hardest apples. One week in late July we held hands through the bars of his hospital bed. Our sleep made a canopy over us and it seemed I heard its durable roaring in the companion sleep of what must have been our Bedouin god, and now when the poppy lets go I know it is to lay bare his thickly seeded black coach at the pinnacle of dying. My shaggy ponies heard the shallow snapping of silk but grazed on down the hillside, their prayer flags tearing at the void—what we stared into, its cool flux of blue and white. How just shaking at flies they sprinkled the air with the soft unconscious praise of bells braided into their manes. My life simplified to “for him” and his thinned like an injection wearing off so the real gave way to the more-than-real, each moment’s carmine abundance, furl of reddest petals lifted from the stalk and no hint of the black hussar’s hat at the center. By then his breathing stopped so gradually I had to brush lips to know an ending. Tasting then that plush of scarlet which is the last of warmth, kissless kiss he would have given. Mine to extend a lover’s right past its radius, to give and also most needfully, my gallant hussar, to bend and take.

a labyrinth, as if at its center, god would be there— but at the center, only rose, where rose came from, where rose grows— & us, inside of the lips & lips: the likenesses, the eyes, & the hair, we are born of, fed by, & marry with, only flesh itself, only its passage —out of where?    to where? Then god the mother said to Jim, in a dream, Never mind you, Jim, come rest again on the country porch of my knees.

Why do roses need their thorns? Some things are little known. But thorns of roses spring and seize the surface of  fey airs before the roses come. I’ve seen thorns huddle in a harmony alone, hunkered down on green, wiry canes, smoothed blades of whipping rose stalks, and curl their polished tridents to night’s call. They are like stars digging into firmament with such desire, you don’t quite get it, and so healthy that they almost have to wound, or like bodies that can’t be argued, borrowed, tamed. The touch of a thorn is a wry, deep telling of the senses not to bloom without a wish to, without belief  in pain to hold us true.

There is no escaping the storm of roses crisscrossed on the split-cracked wall of a dead fountain arch. There is no escaping their uterine balls, expanding as a reminder of the children I never had. If you listen carefully you can hear the vibrations, the heart drone of their petal jaw-harps. And there’s no going back, no indiscovery of Mars or these red planets brooding before me, light predators, sun-hatched and bloodening like the fists of women who have gone to war.