Summer observation

An Ornamental Friendship

To stroll among them is immense:

Himalayan blue and Blood red poppies,

their stems tangled like lovers’ legs,

in fecund nearness, remembrance of ease.

And yet, such a trembling distance

as if the poverty of winter froze

their roots while the whorl of stamen

reveals black eyes, slow to apologize.

The bees’ gossipy buzz stifles

promises of garden resurrection,

one ardent opiate of spring.

Their message: summer has begun and some

cerulean petals lie still,

crumpled in jaded testicular buds,

their 7-pointed stars hanging

down toward fertile ground, as some blushing

persistent petals mark their place

in the sun, briefly, then lie flat

before falling away, uncut,

into fantasies of eternal sleep. 

In Response to JJ's paintings

Re-entry

I peer up from the bottom of the sea

and see a watercolor fantasy

through slivers of a blue moon.

“Be still in lavender streaks of sleep tonight,”

the Buddha winks.  “Tomorrow you will see.”

I’m feeling teal today,

my tongue a Phoenix flame,

a fuchsia pyre of words unspoken.

My poise of mind lost, hidden deep

like a crystal scepter in a galaxy of rage.

Once I was cut into three,

A patch of bad, a swirling orange crush.

I held on and wailed, “Don’t go.  Don’t go!”

until my burgundy heart bled black and I sunk

to the bottom of the sea.

But today I rise from an absence of color,

surface to body surf on an ocean path.

Untitled solar flares greet me.

I squint and sway to a conch shell refrain,

the sound of infinity.

The Buddha grins

because although three black squares

once divided Heaven and Earth,

today has turned metallious gold

with a boundary-less horizon.

“Look, I see you,” the Buddha laughs.

“Can you see?”  An inestimable burst,

unbound spectrum, fields of color and swirl,

 “I see you.  Can you see? That’s you

in the resplendent prisms of love and letting go.”

What lies beyond?

Beyond Time

There is a future, lined

on the back of her sundrenched hand,

but she cannot read its then or now or then.

Her time, uncharted in this emerald light

of one summer afternoon, late,

a hiatus between lavender sachets

and honeybees who settle in for long sucking

while the rope hammock sways away 

each moment to shadowed slants beyond 

beyond that poem, unfinished, there is time,

unparsed but for the comma added

then deleted or the ‘burning act’

revised to ‘bitter and burning’,

but for cuts that remain unscarred

and wine glasses never emptied. That poem balances

unwritten, never danced to bed, to climax,

that poem, her time, suspends like a champagne bubble

on crystal’s lip, never to release, never to be tongued.