Mysterious – priapic – in her slow ascent
through olive-green, cloudy, particulate water.
Seldom predicted, looked-for for days,
her dark bomb rising, an old balancing act
on a turgid stalk. Upped in blind pursuit,
her slow-motion chasing of out-riding scouts –
that series of pan-flat, broadening leaves
that wince maroon to racing green with the strain
of powering out of the pond’s darkest places.
Imagined only by those who stoop low enough,
I see the crud, skeletal leaves, the sink away
to another dimension. Here at last she comes,
tracked closely at four, three, two inches shy
of this world, rarely seen, broaching herself
in the sun-warm air, the blue-lit afternoon.
In that instant becomes her own subject saying:
*
me, talk about me, about my tear-drop shape,
my split heart open to kissable pink. Look!
Little raptor head! My dense-packed bud!
My elegant lack of interest in what lies ahead.
From the darkness, I leap to such a climax,
to this ball-gown flounce I know is enough.
Not your passing face, your agitated air.
Your stinks. Your nice understanding! Talk!
Your destructive nature! Your persecutions
for no better reason than you mislike a face!
All promise, cross-tongued and double-crossed
with weakness, petty, knife-edged, all taint.
Look how I rise – see my focus, intensity!
I am my own devising. Damn what’s behind.
Of myself, I give nothing. All I ask is free.
Shake off this idiocy! Take a look at me!
*
You stoop to find she cannot be still for long:
her surface beauty equivalent to being young.
You see the crud, skeletal leaves, the sink back,
say you’ve no reply to what she just said
since you carry such freight, so much baggage,
the worst and best of it your love of language.
Waiting like a spider at the cross-hairs
of words and things, you screw up in a moment,
you lose it from too little attention paid,
from being shut too closely in body and bone,
eyes too dimmed with another man’s dream,
trying ideas, emotions like cast-off clothes.
You know little of yourself, less of others
and if once in a while the cross-hairs align,
straight, true, you say this, this is mine.
The report echoes long after the lily survives.
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