1.
flung to your salt parameters in all that wide gleam
unbounded edgeless in that brilliant intersection
where we poured the shattered grit the salt
and distillation of you which blew back
into my face stinging like a kiss
from the other world a whole year
you’ve languished blue in ceaseless wind
naked now in all lights and chill swaddlings
of cloud never for a moment cold you are
uninterruptible seamless as if all this time
you’d been sleeping in the sparkle and beckon
of it are you in the pour of it
as if there were a secret shining room
in the house and you’d merely gone there
we used to swim summers remember
naked in those shoals now I think was I ever
that easy in this life
fireworks remember Handel an orchestra
on a barge in the harbor and fountains
spun to darkness flung in time to
the music scrawling heaven like sperm like
chrysanthemums bursting in an enormous hurry
all fire and chatter flintspark and dazzle
and utterly gone save here in the scribble
of winter sunlight on sheer mercury
when I was a child some green Fourth
flares fretting the blueback night
a twirling bit of ash fell in my open eye
and for a while I couldn’t see those skyrockets
is it like that now love some cinder
blocking my sight so that I can’t see you
who are only for an hour asleep and dreaming
in this blue and light-shot room
as if I could lean across this shifting watery bed
and ask are you awake
2. Everywhere
I thought I’d lost you. But you said I’m imbued
in the fabric of things, the way
that wax lost from batik shapes
the pattern where the dye won’t take
I make the space around you,
and so allow you shape. And always
you’ll feel the traces of that wax
soaked far into the weave:
the air around your gestures,
the silence after you speak.
That’s me, that slight wind between
your hand and what you’re reaching for;
chair and paper, book and cup:
That close, where I am: between
where breath ends, air starts.
3. Van Gogh: Flowering Rosebushes: 1889
A billow of attention
enters the undulant green,
and so configures it
to an unbroken rhythm,
summer’s continuous surface,
dappled and unhurried,
—though subject to excitations,
little swarms of shifting strokes
which organize themselves
into shadow and leaf, white starbursts
of bloom: a calm frenzy
of roses. His June’s one green
unbordered sea, and he’s gone
into it entirely—nothing here
but the confident stipple
and accumulation of fresh
and silken gesture, new again
in a rush of arrival. Don’t you want
to be wrapped, brocaded,
nothing to interrupt
the whole struck field
in the various and singular
complexity of its music?
To be of a piece with the world,
whole cloth? These little passages
accrue, differ, bursts of white roses,
ripples and striations; what’s Van Gogh
but a point of view? Missing
from the frame, he’s everywhere,
though it would be wrong
to think him at the center
of the scene: his body’s gone,
like yours. Rather it’s as if
this incandescent stuff—
a wildly mottled Persian scarf
whose summary pattern
encapsulates shoreline and garden,
June’s jade balconies of wave
and blossom tiered, one above the other,
in terraces of bloom—
were wrapped around him,
some splendid light-soaked silk
weightless, motile, endlessly figured
and refiguring: gone into the paint,
dear, gone entirely into (white rose
& leaf, starry grasses) these waves
of arriving roses, the tumbling rose
of each arriving wave.