Languid, voluptuous, orange

This poem forms a pair with the previous one (see yesterday's blog entry).

TRANSPARENT SPRING

This wheel’s unseen circumference

includes a coffee can

from Hart – a Savarin,

no? – looping a salience

of tulip spires (languid, voluptuous,

orange).  For Hart, Johns

sounded gray Ocean

& signaled with a palm Love’s

one transparent spring (from deep

to deep).  A little tree –

lemon? – mustard, maybe;

the orange flourish of a steep

green trumpet, embracing its iron

lattice like a bride

in May... no one can hide

from Love’s almond dominion.

This doctrine bides each alteration.

A sigh amid these wheels

rides wingèd heels

from scythe to seedy germination –

Time’s origin (space-flowering).

Leaf-whispers from a pair

of olive trees, who share

one catenary pattern... stirring

life-draft, dangled from twin pillars,

lifted toward Pacific

azure – scarred, terrific

sentinels of hope (hers, yours).

4.13.16

Tulips (Nancy Hart)

Thinking about the color grey lately.

Sort of an indeterminate blend of two already-absent shades. Grey sea, grey clouds, grey stone, grey pigeons, grey whales, grey dolphins. The old grey Manxman in Moby Dick.

Grey is the servant of the other colors.

On a walk over the weekend in South County, passed a greenish silver-grey tree with scarlet berries, which I thought was some kind of willow, but Sarah said it was probably an autumn olive, an invasive species on the East Coast, almost indistinguishable from the Russian olive.

Anny Ballardini tells me that today is a Roman holiday : Ferragosto. Turn off the lights. Lie under a silver olive tree.