Affordable Flowers

If only love was acquired easily as these:
The self-assured white roses, edifice of lilies,
Bleeding narcissus and rosemary, the awe
Of halved-milk cartons wielding the bunches
Of glib petals on a country road in August.

But no, remember Swann wrapped up in his illusions:
The little violin sonata by Franck
Replaying in his head, giving him grief
And happiness; the heavy syllables that soured
In his belly when he spoke her name, Odette.

Love with all its clumsiness, confusions,
Consequences. The law of the dragonfly
Battering his wings over the tar pit until he sticks.
That type of habit we’re enchanted by:
Dumb pomp and ardent spark of hurt.

Now they’re selling chrysanthemums and orange nasturtiums
On weekends in that light blue enameled booth
Under the oaks and palpitations of October.
So few gravitate to purchase. The prudent children
Wait who have picked the admirable from the grandfatherly shadows.

No one stops. The good society perhaps is inured now
To beauty. No one plays music in the garden anymore.
No one is seduced by the tea-colored pond or the illumination of ponies.
The faithful go home to their faithful grey flats, their private rooms.
The flowers remain harmonious, brilliant, undefeated.

The Angels

Maybe those stone angels with the cracked elbows holding up the organ’s pipes
hold up the entire world after all, maybe we are all flawed in specific ways

like the blind calf that followed its mother through the pastures of clover,
oblivious to the fact of slaughter as the mother was oblivious for in spring

the mud swallow was having its fledglings as was the flycatcher, both
returning to the same nesting place from the previous year and littering

the ground with waste and the tearing of feathers, the angels know
the man with the white cane has practiced and practiced his route

over the bridge of the Seine where the lockets of lovers remain,
he recognizes some of those lovers are no longer netted in affection

but are strained as the riverboat that carries its passengers is strained
as the passengers live in constant disdainful anxiety to fill their eyes

and their ears with the senses, and even their mouths with the sharp
sensation of lemons and quinces picked by the laborers whose hands

get little recognition, for even the laborers know a spot of dirt will
always cling to the fruit though it is rinsed daily before display;



we are all of us moving as the swans move, migratory over the waters
in winter, and in summer we return to the same little pool

next to the carousal that moves like a timepiece, timepiece
like the blue dashes of paint Miro swathed on his most beautiful

of canvases, wanting us to see the through his eyes the same spacious,
blue field, blue a symbol of a world of cosmic dreams, the unconscious

where his mind flowed clearly and without any order. Blue
the colour of a surreal, ethereal night, a night embodying the only place

where dreams could exist in their untainted uncensored rawest state.

Practical World

He said he wanted to know
what they knew—those who did
practical things like building boats
or cleaning streets, so my son
shaped by the sharp angles
of academia decided to live
on water where the red-winged blackbirds clung to the swaying
tulles, where the cool winds of March
clipped the deluge of the cattail
thickets, and where the first settlers
of the Delta needed words to describe
their often dire predicament:
Disappointment Slough, Hope Trace, Poverty Road.
Here life had been unpredictable, undependable
and some had drowned in the sloughs,
the desiccated bottomlands, channels, canals,…
But not my son who rose each morning
to travel to the inner city with a team
of riparian men to jackhammer
the hard macadam of Oakland, to hear
the dunch of his own blood
drum in his ear, noggle his heart
until the ground opened up
like eternity, he was that driven
my physicist, to know the gowpen of matter,
know his fellow creatures—men
who ate from tin cans and drank eagerly
from heavy thermoses as if knocking back
the sea. This was not
a straightjacket for him, this everyday
grit-grail, no it deepened his thinking,
made him love the earth more
learning the hot ooze of the hour, this workbench mentality, grunt and pluck
of male heritage.