Category: swoon

In My Hurry

The curious lavender attentions to itself of the jacaranda
Stopped me, as through the leaves and small avenues

In late summer I made my way in love toward you.
The tree’s flowering was an intimacy I had not earned,

A color of undergarment or something from the better
Pages in the book already underlined by classmates.

It was lavender or lilac, something from the hundred blues,
This color without rank and without help, standing there,

Giving me the gift over and over again but high up, outside
My reach, which made my desire to touch it all the more.

The color and the tree, the moment and the lateness of the season,
They joined in a gang of what I could see was a tangle of sinew,

So much muscle in search of the cover-skin of an arm,
The tree itself seeming all at once an arm unleashed,

Strength itself gone wild in its parts to the sky.
This was an arm that had stopped me—

How could I not have seen it? This tree was an arm
And more than an arm, its muscle strung in everything

So that the tree—everything about it—the tree
Made itself of arm and leg, leg and neck, at angles,

At stops and starts and in bends, everything broken,
Everything but the lavender, which was flower,

So much lavender coming from what was left, what must be
A mouth, a thousand mouths, at once speaking

The lavender or the lilac, the blue, understood language.
These were match-tipped words asking the impossible of me,

Whatever I imagined the impossible to be: a bowl of cherries
In winter, or that I might come again by this place and stop.

Absent of reason, I could agree to anything addressing a tree.
The cherries were not much, I know, but what they meant,

Born of this exotic, all lavender and muscle, held me.
It was an equal and other necessity, calling to me in my hurry.

It was a tree in wild color calling to a tree in wild color,
And the lavender, I think you know what the lavender is.

Totally

 

I’m raking leaves and singing in my off-key voice
a mangled version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,”
a song I thought I hated;

that’s how it goes when your head and heart
are in different time zones—
you often don’t find out till tomorrow
what you felt today.

I know I do not understand the principles
of leaf removal; I pile them up
in glowing heaps of cadmium and orange,

but I identify so much more
with the entropic gusts of wind
that knock them all apart again.
Is it natural to be scattered?

When I look into the sky I am often dreaming
of a television program that I saw some months ago;
when I walk into a dinner party

I am thinking of the book I mean to read
when I get home—you might say
my here is disconnected from my now,
so never am I entirely anywhere,

or anyone. But I won’t speak cruelly
of myself: this dividedness is just what
makes our species great: possible for Darwin

to figure out his theory of selection
while playing five-card stud,
for surgeon Keats to find a perfect rhyme
wrist-deep in the disorder
of an open abdomen.

For example, it is autumn here.
The defoliated leaves look frightened
at the edge of town,

as if the train they missed
had taken all their clothes.
The whole world in unison is turning
toward a zone of nakedness and cold.

But me, I have this strange conviction
that I am going to be born.