Bouquet Beneath the Tower

poem #81

‘An Architectural Historian’s Garden, Guernsey,’ photo by the author

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What we have learned to do efficiently
is to split the tongue beneath the tower.
                          An axe-head dislocated 
from a grotto on the eastern coast
has kissed the forehead of our tongue
             and splayed it open like a tulip,
blooming from its bulb to melt—(eventually)...

The eye has moved from flesh to glass
and images have moved with us
from stone, back into light;
             the way a violet's grandmother
will simmer on the skin of progeny,
             a rarified beauty of the sun, that feeds them
and will see them slowly drowned in love.

The insight that has shown the laureled prophets
iron’s climb from boiling subterrains
             to jet on jagged angles through the air,
then harden where our tongues no longer taste
                          the sour pit of elder fruits—this
insight only leads us to the tower's rooted foot
more quickly than it took our ancestors to find it.

             The world is a bouquet 
held out to nothing, for the sake 
of its wayfinding back into a hand
that might express, in feeble grasping for the petals,
                          grace;
             (...we too have stumbled, languageless
to stop beneath clay edifices, rounded under time, 
             on the way back into vastness,
gasping out decreasing stores of breath 
                                       toward senescence).

The Ipomoea alba opens 
in the the chain of light
             translated by the moon into the lake 
of lilac-white that pools
             to round the harshness of the continents—
by its murmured memory we know the spill
of seeded, silken largesse 
             from the central turning hand
that crenellates the hills, that buttresses the roads
that wind around and through the tower gardens...

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