(For Paul Bouman)
This long stretch of years, fast dissolving into the past,
Is merely the instant before the conductor raises his baton,
Before the first stirrings of soil as the green-tipped crocus breaks through,
Before the images fill the page of the poet
When beauty is no more than a tug of words on the tongue. Selah.
A morning of golden light
after two days’ stormy darkness
illuminates the bleak twistedness
of trees now dressed, not in leaves,
but centuries growth of lichens
and green, glowing mosses
that drape and devour their hosts.
After the orgy of wild wind dancing
the limbs are quiet, as if awaiting
the giver of gale and gentleness.
They are like all the baptized
who arise from troubled waters
washed clean of all ugliness,
with one side still in darkness.
If green curtains frame the window—
forest green an instructor would call them—
and if dust shades the glass,
a foreground of light slate—
if steel bars or aluminum
block light to six of nine balconies
across the back alley that’s less
than an alley—if the grid
of yellow balconies is a lesson
in perspective set for you—
and if the variant (bottom left)
of jacket, underwear, and white towel
hung from a bamboo pole is intentional—
Attend to the details, my son!—
if the silver water tanks that disrupt
The gang of purple iris outside my window
have been calling me all day with soft
sexual lips, the graffiti of their yellow stamen, their
dark velvet foreheads, exclamation points of leaves.
Look at them trembling in the rain, their delicate bright
mouths streaming water. They may stand up until
tomorrow, if that, these scaly lumps I tucked
in bed last fall. They are wild, bewildered
This bus stop in late sun—
Bench, narrow, backless, low,
In black-framed kiosk, all
Metal and plexiglass,
All sides enclosed but one—
Today turns studio
For a woman, a long haul
From home, what things she has
Stuffing a shopping cart,
Though now her sketchbook’s laid
Open across her lap
And chalks lead bright, discrete
Realities into art.
But what can be remade?
Hard seasons? Not the slap
That winter—back on its feet—
Will naturally impart,
Whatever she might trap