Hidden gardens
the secret garden
i.m.f.
“Wingnut.” “A pleasure, how are things with you; Crimean-lind,
no, not of the Crimehilde family, or maybe she is
an impoverished branch–” “It’s as if I know you from a former life;
was it Tiergarten, when all of us were chopped up
for firewood in that war winter
or Buddha’s deerpark?” “A dash of cloud with your rain?”
“And a little honey from the last bee would be nice.”
Still a smart tweed-green, discreetly lisping, they stand right behind Ting-Jie,
Miss Ginkgo, who rich and graceful above the hoi-polloi
would be a golden fanfare if colour could resound.
The radiant is weightless, sings in silence. Lifts itself, flies, swirls, sinks.
The Turkish hazel, the yellow black alder, the sun
has fecundated her fruit.
Then, like tinkling glinting of light-cascades, Zeus too came
and scattered his deadly abundance in the turret room
of the locked-up maiden:
conception, inclining always to its end.
Everything drifts down towards the source –
a hallmark of autumn
just as do you already lying there
sleeping under moss.
Above the garden hangs a rounding where air conspired
against every form of disappearance: a mouth
opened so wide the the ground beneath our feet
along aloft –
to winter sleep among the wind-down
of migrating final geese,
in the dark their cackling conversations almost intelligible –
‘If something is born, has lived, how can it ever
still escape then from the world
and the sky around it, to leave itself behind itself
for an eternity of centuries, amen?’
You keep silent but we hear you even so:
each leaf that falls a sigh
from under the moss.
the winter garden
The sweet gum
and the black-spot-bedewed rose leaves
I grant a voice so dark as that
of the female singer who, draped over a stone pond-dolphin’s back
mercilessly enters a salty mist
billowing up from the throats of virilely but sadly blown horns
at the opening bars of K 427, the Kyrie.
What awaits us when the autumn starts to sing,
awakened from our own fire? Splinters, drumfire?
What does that hammering in the distance presage? –
We are still outshiners, with a wilful, lyrical lament
of self-squandered paradises, of the eternally beckoning:
entombment threatens – you already sense it – from what was of man,
in casu melody, anthem, the soul’s release.
Stifled to undertones from the bursting basin;
if you are old enough to have known the primal version
you are no whit deafer than then –
what makes one human is after all the imagination.
Let all that lives now gasp for breath in a final hymn of praise:
true glory is for nature, that stinking, soured yonder –
in gases that will choke us
already dawns a new-born winter and a new-born sound.
garden of delights well no
The field of the sacred apple trees is
the place where the god dwells in his world, weds her.
I have seen the schekinah on display:
a gauze bridal dress adorned with glass shards, empty sheath
the divine presence. Blind walls round about –
she has wept her eyes out: for the lacking,
the cracking which of creation is the seed.
In an arid desert an apple orchard can
be holy – but here? With hot snacks and loads of
drinking yoghurt on offer, and a hotline
for sexually abused footballers of advanced years?
O, the blossom so delicate, short-lived and yet part
of the tiring eternal advance: blossom, pollination,
withering. Something of the god himself, by the god himself banished,
makes an abyss in him. That is why she weeps, now already,
the schekinah, while creation has yet to begin,
with, straight away in the earthly paradaise, for example
the one apple tree – waste of the whirlwind,
god’s breath that will cast us out. We are down and out
until death. But the garden keeps flowering, a secluded
spot in us where a god forbade himself entry.
garden a yarn i’ve spun
‘Smoking’s intensified breathing.’ Smoking at night,
a final sigh before you failing yourself depart
as one that has died till that person wakes up and seems
to still be – you.
Breathe all the darkness in – let white smoke flower away,
trailing. On a fragile stem your lily opens out,
stars swarm around it. Break of day
is but a dream, you may lie quietly down and die.
No comments:
Post a Comment