Thursday April 16, 2009
The Garden in Sunlight
The Garden in Sunlight
Go by white poppies, white tulips, white flags, go by
the white willow arch, go by the apple tree, its full white crop,
go by the pond where white-eyed fish
slide by deeper each day, then out to the lawn, its trackless white
a mirror image of the trackless sky;
but think now: after you’ve set foot you’re on a wish
and a promise, adrift in white’s slow creep
away and over the edge, though something takes you straight
to those little spoil heaps: bone that breaks to ash
under your hand...and you backtrack, hoping for sight
of the house, perhaps, or the garden gate, or the street,
but it’s white-on-white however hard you try,
and a hum in the air, white noise, which could be some rash
report of you: figment, divertimento, little white lie.
*********
Sometimes I love poems for the direct hit of humanity I get from them, like an opiate, like a spike of experience - a poem so true and a voice so strong that it pierces and permeates me.
Other times I love poems for the questions they raise, their elusiveness, they draw me in, labyrinthine, the slower disclosure and sometimes I don’t ever ‘get it’ but I love them nonetheless because they take me somewhere I wouldn’t otherwise have gone. I want to go there, I want to stay.
This poem is the latter for me. I don’t really ‘get it’ entirely, and yet I do. I have been there in that garden wanting and wondering those things - in my own fashion.
I have stood in gardens and felt acutely the life of plants and the quality of air and that very sharp moment, and I have wondered what I am and why I am. I think that is what this poem is about?
I am happy not to entirely know. That is the very texture of life - both knowing and not knowing.