A Way to Restore Beauty to the Universe
On this side of grace, silence is a tilted world of seasons. [Silence is ferny,
not a seaport of industry.]
Silence — on a dock, mounds of salt. [Mined out of mineral silence.]
Our silvering, our aging bottles of rosemary, cardamom in the dim light —
[The light of algae forests, I mean —
and seed pearls in the mouths of oysters,
the blooming walls of a cloud. [An eyelash weeps an eyelash.]
[A house no longer stands. Neither does the pine, its sacrifice.] A boy lifts
a shakuhachi
in the woods,
the bamboo flute his grandfather once whittled,
a shakuhachi whose fingering is forgotten.
[If you place a song in brackets — leave it open —
[This is a silence
of yearning, a gift-tree in the wound.]
[Is silence the only answer to this query?] A drum in the ear, tacit?
And how do we pay more attention
after a day’s remote work —
This fluted silence –
[a way to restore beauty
to the universe.]
* * * * *
A Garden, Post-Catastrophe
A fiddlehead unfurls a fleecy, coiled question
in our future. Did we ever foretell
calamity in a garden of succulents – cholla, prickly pear,
echeverria up to our shoulders, a topiary hedgehog
of shapely cactus irradiated by starlight?
Who presaged the unfolding of catastrophe?
Did we ever come here, before we knew one other?
Our botanical monograph of stills in memory –
jacaranda in bloom, a gorgeous mess
on the pavement, and a long-haired violinist
who stepped shyly out of greenery
for the sole purpose of recording
an audio of timeless lyric
with murmurs of water splashing from pool to pool
in late echoes of afternoon light
where we wondered if we could use the word lyric
without invoking an anachronism –
in the garden, at the height of a lamb’s chin,
a gnomon darkens a telltale sliver of time
with a shadow, nearly motionless, while the sundial
hums a speechless whimsy in a world of noise
contrary to voices and the visible,
so vulnerable to verdigris –
we spoke to a copper sundial to call on womankind,
our sisters in the desert, our mothers on the coast
evoking laughter not yet forgotten in a season of grief –
yes, this afternoon, we return to an elemental good,
of rosemary crisps kissed by fig butter, an orchid tree
of elegiac lamps offered by those who love us,
how light is loaned to us from God –
wherein light, mingled with the unsaid,
is a form of silent laughter, of mirth and mystery alike.
This is poetry, how we reenter the human after the anthropause –
how we partake of this bread of mutual presences
made out of a door of flesh, of souls in mud unhinged
by the hands of a holy presence, the maker of all things
who gathers the crushed hulls of jacaranda
on this fragrant lane riddled
with scraps of beauty and strife.