Datum: stretching wisteria, grown thick
as a strong young wrist
wrapped around the white verandah column
with such a grand and
helical gesture of its twisted stalk
diving behind it,
as if to say, “any as if to say…/
they’d try and paint me
with can never manage to stick to me”.
But paint away at
fable’s coloring books they always would.
Consider thus a
pliant something entwining something stiff
and vertical-the
very syntax of their kind of verdant
touch can encode far
more meaning than any particular
pair might keep for and
from us, half hidden-half revealed, such as:
the grape vine clinging
to the olive-tree which whimpers ever, Why do you molest me,
vine, I’m Athena’s tree; take all your grapes,
heavily bunched and
dangling, away—a virgin must flee Bacchus’ crushing attentions.
Or, bare of leaves, the withering old elm gently enfolded
in the sweet shading green another vine extends about it:
pictured in the old books they represented amicitia,
loving friendship, etiam post mortem
durans, extending
even beyond the grave. And so forth. But hanging between the
last dusk and the shivering candlelight, the wisteria
itself unpainted, bare of fancied mottoes never disowns its
high obligation, though, to overspread all that supports it,
bearing triumphal flags of blossom, and—
like some deep-rooted
vine that Hawthorne might have murmured of, flowering here and
there but slowly pulling the ancient house
of straightforwardness
apart― asserting without rhetoric
the fundamental
turning of what is rectilinear
into the bending
a serpent back in some first garden used
to move around with,
and which-having forever left that place-wa all we brought with us,
out into an unyielding world of fact,
to make our way with—
to mark out what forever lies more deep than verity itself.
Entwining
Did you enjoy the the artible “Entwining” from John Hollander on OZOFE.COM? Do you know anyone who could enjoy it as much as you do? If so, don't hesitate to share this post to them and your other beloved ones.
Leave a Reply