The White Campion

How is it I can never find

Or call to mind

One image of Christ walking slowly in the rain,

In a steady, gentle rain,

The kind that shapes an afterimage

Just for a moment of the man

Like a cloak of shadow following

Or like a blank page

After it’s been turned?

The dead are concealed from us

But not distorted by the rain.

They remember our having remembered.

A woman curls up on the sofa.

Years before the fact she sleeps

Her death and drapes it

Even now, exactly as she must.

Just after dawn,

In the wren’s eye

There are no blossoms left in the trees,

And yet the sunlight blazons white

New flowers onto every leaf.

The wren’s eye gorges itself,

Bursting the new life.

The memory of a tree is the tree.

Christ could fly.

Impale upon him certain words

Good as Greek

For the impulse of the earth is to seek

A language of flowers

That do not die, turning

A hair’s breadth toward us

Even now, exactly as they must.

If it was justice I saw

Fall from the sun

Onto boys ruining the one

Flower shared between them,

So be it.

The woman on the sofa wears a little wing

In her sleep. When she awakes,

Its twin will be the wren in the dream

Nearly there, nearly all the way

There into the human day.

Rain falls out of brilliant sunshine.

For a moment, her window

Fills with catastrophe, boys

Torn apart and scattered, white petals

Blackening the glass,

Exacting recent justice.

So strange that the recent past,

As chaste

As antiquity, as the orangery

Of a blind eye, should at once appear

Preposterous

Yet achingly tender.

Modern times are too cautious.

The boyish, florid love of catastrophe

Has thrust a fist into the dawn,

And the scent of that fist,

Whose citron betters daylight,

Is wasted on modern times.

Not long ago, you and I

Nearly captured a wren.

Christ lifted His face then,

And rain fell all day until evening.

ii

In a corner of my garden, there is a spider’s web

Entirely armored in rose petals broken off by rain.

The spider will learn to eat roses, or he will starve to death.

This is political economy for modern times.

The planet dies. The planet starves its cruel interiors

First, with a blazon of colors and soft poetry. Next,

It apportions one small bird to every tree and sets fire

To the trees. The rest is the cold business of the oceans

Who have never forgiven us for breathing air.

Homer was tempted. Loose thighs of oblivion

Welcomed humanity away from itself and from life,

And only one of the Bronze-Age host refused that welcome.

He was the father of starvation, entirely armored

In the disguise of a real man, destroyer of oceans.

We have made ugly war upon distinctions.

Canon bleeds a wedding into the gigue, and “when

I try to imagine a faultless love or” the seedtime

Of my deepest convictions — that the soul is immortal,

That a woman couched upon a fragile little wing

Created the creator of the universe — thought,

Or rather the entire machinery of truth and terror

Usurps a newborn king, i.e. imagination.

Phaedrus, step down. There is a little wing wearing sunshine

Like wind in the white hair of the bee you never imagined.

An infinitesimal distance goes on forever.

At the moment of death, the light hand of Attic stele

Softly lights upon the shoulder of eternity,

And thought yields to flesh and flesh yields to imagination,

Sexing this or that unimaginable creation

With new hair. It makes a difference. We are bound to one another

And to God by harrowing, albeit helpless distinctions,

Impossible to bridge, imperative to love well.

We are free, but briefly. The pattern of a leaf branches

Out from human hearts, and the blood spills

Into the pattern a stone makes crashing into windshields.

God follows. The wrist and wing of the beloved follow

Close behind, and not even Hell prevails against

This new extinction. Slow time is the beginning

Of no time at all. The light hand of Attic stele

Wrests me from the sleep I’d imagined life to be —

The walking stone, the irreparable Gethsemane —

And I am awake, wearing a green flesh newly fashioned

From my heart.

coda

Should the bird outlast the blossom in the tree?

Keep faith, but keep it silently,

Starveling.

I keenly remember there were two of us,

And a stand of poplars like a kiss

Quavering

Upon the shade of the earth where no earth was

Ready to bear the weight of us

Relinquishing

Soul for substance, pistil of white campion

For color, continuance and one

Unbelieving

Substance of perfect memory.

There were no trees.

The sun was shining.