Scented Garden \ I Feed You

Nancy:  That first day when I’m washing dishes and the open window says Thérèse Bugnet, yes, rose is.

Scented Garden

If you worry that

a rose is a rose

is inadequate reportage

consider how

the true message of

the rose was never

meant for you but

for some other creature

bee perhaps or some

precursor of bee

that it might

dance implications

of rose

pre-word scintillations

of rose and now those

lost volatile vocabularies

are buried under

layers of cells

rich in words coruscating

plangent susurrant

words for our tangible

solid fierce lives

Alan:  Another poem for my dead brother.  Why I use the British spelling of “airplane,” I don’t know, except that a lot of the books I read as a child, and would have read to him, were English.

I Feed You

One by one, the peas entered your mouth like aeroplanes –

they were aeroplanes, entering the hanger, not to re-appear.

It was a slow way to eat, but it worked:

the airport of your body made accepting, workaday noises.

I don't know why this matters, after forty years,

except that maybe it was then I learned

I could bamboozle your stubbornest rage

and that you had ways of forcing from me

the easy tribute of play.

And anyway, you are no longer here

to naysay: it was aeroplanes, not boats or bombs, their fat

green selves entering your body, swooping

or in a sly, circling slant; you sat on my left

on the hard bench looking out at the lake

and the sun sparkled on the water like sky,

the spoon descending again and again in the sunset,

or at least I think so.