Wednesday, May 23, 2012

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.

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