floriental

There is a girl inside. She is randy as a wolf. She will not walk away and leave these bones to an old woman. She is a green tree in a forest of kindling. She is a greeen girl in a used poet. She has waited patient as a nun for the second coming, when she can break through gray hairs into blossom and her lovers will harvest honey and thyme and the woods will be wild with the damn wonder of it.

I remember nightfall and your room’s open door, the door through which neighbors and angels came in. And the clouds—november evening clouds, drifting in circles over the land. The little trees burdened with jasmine, with doves and droplets of water. That joyous pealing, endless chirping—every evening the same. And then the next morning, with its tiny dead angels strewn everywhere like paper birds, or the most exquisite of eggshells. Your dazzling death.

I’m not going to say anything about bridges. or horses. or sky ripped apart by birds. there are no fires. in this poem. no lips trailing smoke. no rearview mirror eyes. I’m not going to compare her eyelashes to flags waved from departing ships. or her eyes themselves to rain through dusty winter windowpanes. her lips to wine stains. her fingers to Japanese paper napkins. that’s not my image anyway. you won’t find any scarecrows between these rows of words. no train whistles in the vowel sounds. no silent movies reflected in her sunglasses I’m not going to say that her syllables are arpeggios of surrender. or anything like that. in fact. my poem girl’s breath is nothing like the sweet of night’s earth. her ribcage isn’t rattled by the angry bird I call her heart.

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.