The matriarch with eyes like arrowheads
Sat in a shawl of sunlight, amber beads
Hung from her tribal ears. Orange the noon.
Ah, Dr. Johnson kept the peels, she said,
In his coat-pocket till they withered quite.
The rinds of noon like orange-rinds had blown
Out of her lap across the bright, dazed grass,
Lay shriveling flat upon a scorched perspective,
As though her gaze imperial had expressed
No wish to fix them or, since all flesh is grass,
Fix poets, gross eccentrics who exist
High in the shallowest stratum of the past.
These learned gentlemen are frivolous soil,
She said, that one plows up for relics— skulls
And pottery. There is a base of stone:
Pure rock that bears no pinchbeck marigolds,
Intelligent with age which is the skill
To endure accumulations of deep time.
She rose; her head built in a blossoming
That recognized no facile season swung
Beyond the orange hour. So it passed.
And on the lawn the gardener gathered up
The scattered orange peels, whether to keep
Them or destroy them, one could only guess.
She watched as though her eyes of artifact
In a profound age had from darkness cut
Clean diagrams in vaults of perfect rock
That no air dampens. Luminous in these walls
Language is glittering of flint rituals
And a race of sober children learn long smiles.
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