Dearest: Today was warm.
I sprayed the roses,
Pumping on our old-fashioned
Sprayer as if psychosis
Itself had taught my arm
To be impassioned;
And thinking on you gone.
You know that white
Mold that attacks the leaf
Like mildew, that damn blight
That crusts the bud? That one-
Rosegrower’s grief?
I think I may have thought
If I had fury
And just sprayed hard enough
Somehow I’d get that sorry
And dank infection out
Of me and off
Our roses too. I tried.
We’ll see what happens.
We’ve grown patient of riddles
Now our third movement opens,
The scherzo years, and pride
Falls to the fiddles,
Prancing like those gay-suited
Beggars at Rome’s
Destruction. Look! Tomorrow
Like some blown mania comes,
Instantly though deep-rooted
In distant sorrow.
I know, that root’s the thorn
Really. Our ages
Recall us all those summers
Spent too in spraying. Rage is
Incessantly forlorn:
Mold or newcomers
Always resumed, the thrips,
The worm or beetle.
I’ll tell you what I think.
(These days my mind’s a nettle
I can’t let loose. It nips
Me. Do you blink?)
I think of health, how willing
Two wounded people
May be to beg its chrism
Under some stainless steeple.
Isn’t this one more killing Absolutism?
A pontiff in us? Well,
I think you take
My meaning. You do see
(For love’s sake, for life’s sake)
Perfection’s will to quell
Our sense to be?
“To be…” Think how it was
Before we came
Our kind, I mean. The mold
Was suffered, so. No shame,
No censure; and the rose
Kept its foothold
And bloomed. Lion his tick
And tick his germ,
Eater and eaten, blight
And blighted, all confirm
Us. (Yes, the rhetoric,
The old birthright!)
For (plainly) being eaten
Was secondary.
You see? Existence counts,
Petals that wax and carry
The painful mold, hardbitten;
Deep sap that mounts.
You ask shall wild rose be
The prettier joy?
Ah, not than our rose garden—
Occasionally. But say,
Will beauty wait on me
As ward or warden?
Besides, the plant in nature—
Soiled, torn-attracted
Our artist bee, whose duty
Made meaning there, exacted
From use an acting pleasure,
An actual beauty.
My point comes clearer. Our
Domestic plant
Tends to pure form, abstract;
God knows, you’ve heard me rant
Often enough: the power
Is form intact
In substance, etc.; form
As work, the thing
In action; not merely
A shape unfilled, a wing
Stilled in the flightless “norm”
Of death or nearly.
(Was it my ranting hurt you,
My knowledge sprung
Out on the floor and wild?
Yet I spoke in your tongue:
ou in your woman’s virtue
Had borne the child.)
You say, suppose our ills,
My ills, have risen
In cultivation-mind
Strangling inside its prison
And heart all torn or else
Struck sightless. Find
In this too nature, being
What we possess,
Dear girl, a natural burden
For all its stylishness.
So we offend, unseeing,
And we ask pardon,
Which shall in part be given,
In part withheld,
By us and by the other.
Then deep and many, yield
Your selves to myriad heaven,
To me thereunder.
So much while spraying. Sun
Hung on the noon
Like damask, and the air
Clung hot to ending June,
The still solstice; my own
Shone everywhere,
Roses, roses-fanged stems,
The thorny snarl,
A tendril swaying down
To rip you, clutch, unfurl
The knots of bright bloodflames
Leaping (a crown!)
Across the brow; and blooms,
Yes, all those flowers,
Red too or a dying color,
Dripping their fragile powers
In petals and perfumes
To quench my dolor.
Creatures of my despair,
These lacerations
Blooming upon the season
Teach me, my dear, some patience
And somewhat more of care
And much of reason.
A joy, homely, intense,
I think will give
Us grace
of our dispersal
Into the relative,
Wherein alone I sense
Our universal.
Nor, woman, do I blather
Of the mass alone,
The species that survives.
I speak the imperfect one
And one still clove together,
And their true lives.
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