The Boy with a Flower Behind His Ear

When you have been on trains on buses on the road with someone

for months living with each other’s filthy teenager things you don’t

expect him to come up with a neat shirt and black trousers from

the bottom of his backpack on the last night which is what he did

looking like a waiter his hair windblown across continents now cut

as if for a ceremony his blue eyes like the summer’s oceans but

before the dinner and the next morning’s flights to separate places

we had to go find Karl Marx’s grave taking the underground across

the city walking under the rippling trees of the cemetery the green

of the place like cinematography and finally we are standing in front

of the famous man’s enormous bronze head and I am looking at him

looking at it I am looking at the side of his smiling face his ear

and the speck of shaving cream I point out to him wanting to touch

him there thirty years his white shirt ahead of me on the path back.

2

On the podcast the psychologist talking about death and our need

to accept death describes a state he calls an anticipatory resoluteness

with solicitous regard for others that will make your life seem an

adventure profused with unshakable joy those were his exact words

I wrote them down understanding that what needed such breathless

saying I have brought to one word you the one word encompassing

all language all tasks all meaning you like those saints in paintings

working with a skull on their desks like the psychologist saying that

the knowledge of death makes for an enlightened life but instead

of knowledge or a skull on my desk there is you and the little blur

the little flicker the little bloom of it on the page you which is only to

say he was right the scholar of poetry who insisted that the work

of poetry is the work of preserving the fact of the beloved the you of

the beloved the work of poetry is preserving the face of the beloved.

3

Like the boy with a flower behind his ear who’s been interrupted

in his pleasure a pleasure first figured in the sprigs of jasmine and

rose in a round clear vase on the table the water in the vase so full

as though it’s just been filled the leaves of the flowers also full

of the glossiness of the clean water and of the plums and cherries

also on the table the fruit rendered by the painter in a tumbling

cascade just at the base of the boy’s torso where the painting is

in shadow is shadowed with a kind of privacy the last and long

part of your looking where you will finally notice the boy’s finger

bitten by the lizard still dangling from the finger the lizard that

must have emerged like a snake from the Eden of those fruits

the boy’s recoil figured in the gasp of the mouth and the shoulder

torqued from its white blouse the shoulder that’s also jasmine and

rose in the Roman sunlight describing it these four hundred years.