The music dies upon the strings
But lingers on
Like other sweetly treasured things
Here once - and gone.
The breeze that blurs the mirror pool
Cannot erase
The outline of the forest cool
Upon its face.
The haunting fragrance of the flowers
Of yesterday
Not all the intervening hours
Can steal away.
And loving friends we used to know
Nor e’er forget
Although they left us long ago
Seem with us yet.
What space
is left
for time to flow freely through
when,
with each stretched instant,
small bits of me
die
falling away
to fill the graves
of unknown heros
and fertilize
wilted flowers?
Ten Day Lilies
outside my window,
dressed in orange.
I stop at the flower lady's cart
to see if she has roses. There are a few,
with straggling leaves. The blooms
are decent still, especially those in pink.
She interrupts her desultory lunch,
brushing crumbs from her sleeve, to slip
a long-stemmed pink from among the buds,
carries it to her work table, and deftly wraps
the stalk in a yellow paper, tying it,
gentle-fingered, with a thin red ribbon.
I watch her eyes as I buy; they are like
those in the face I love, but the spirit is closed:
she has dwelt upon disappointments.
As I turn away, I see in my mind's
eye, myself turning back to buy for her
one of her own roses. Ha! no doubt she must
Leaves, what are you?
Flowers feed on me.
On a hill in Rome
There's my "Magnificent" with the red
Petals and white spike. In Tuscany
My "Passion." And in Paris
The orchid, blue, called by the inhabitants
"The Gendarme." I recall
The night I watered it with tears
In a room that smelled like humus.
And the cactus flowers of Monaco
On the violet-colored hill are unfolding
Near three nuns in their enormous hats
Poised on a rock like gulls or ships that sail
To Africa.
Ripple-skiffed by bird and stone
Tree is held in dark-water
The flowers fight up.
Instead of the classical plucking
of an ex-lover’s Guitar;
Instead of the soft attempts to heal
often shattered dreams;
Instead of pleasing phrases
meant only for sharing;
I am left
with the pounding of dripping faucets
and the stale sound of flowers
dying
in your vase.
From Montreal
Came a flattened tube
filled with a poster
of a picasso print
(such a descent
into affordability).
I have no such treasures for you.
I have no reason
to search for gestures
of forgiveness.
Instead
find a flower
and,
the next time you visit,
drop it softly where I will find it.
Afterwards,
Is there anything new under the sun?
Certainly there is.
See how a bird flies, how flowers smile !
To-day, at last to-day,
I grew to wish to raise
The chrysanthemum flowers.
For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the lonely go.
For the thing unsaid that heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling--calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
When the shadows are falling.
O, be beauty for all my blindness,
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving-kindness
In the dark of the end.
Good morning, Life--and all
Things glad and beautiful.
My pockets nothing hold,
But he that owns the gold,
The Sun, is my great friend--
His spending has no end.
Hail to the morning sky,
Which bright clouds measure high;
Hail to you birds whose throats
Would number leaves by notes;
Hail to you shady bowers,
And you green fields of flowers.
Hail to you women fair,
That make a show so rare
In cloth as white as milk--
Be't calico or silk: