Albert Dubois-Pillet, The Banks of the Marne at Dawn, c. 1888. The J. Paul Getty Museum.
First Letter
Blue spike of flowers
by the side of the road
to the harbor.
Again the turning
of the six-branched world.
Light of Mars
reflected in water
and just before sunrise
sinking beneath
the surface of the water
like a copper
seed.
Ships arrive at the equinox.
In the void spaces
of this letter
in disappearing ink
I have written their names
which can be made
green by a gentle flame.
Chalcedony
It may be later
but it’s not now
the living rock and
triangular rose
of the earth
which point toward
a cleft in the wind—
I looked into myself,
looking for time, some
grain or grit
it had left in me
after passing through,
a signature like
the cloven rock or
the way a ship adds
something to sky
after it’s gone—and it’s
not that I disappeared,
it’s just that I
disappeared for a while,
like the triangular
rose, like the living wind,
like a leek-green radiance
that can’t return to
its source—
Second Letter
Evening bells travel
across fields and there
are coins buried
in the earth.
And you might find one
as you cross the fields
toward home:
rough
electrum struck with
the image of a ram’s
head or lion
rampant or a double
sun, glinting from a stream.
Hills in the distance
going lilac and gold
ash.
And in the air
images glint
for as long as the note
of a bell, flaming spear,
bell, wheel
of stars, bell, flowering branch,
as you cross the fields toward home.
The Quaternary Plant
In Norfolk, Virginia there grows a shrub
with small, star-like flowers that bloom and signal
purple and white in stubborn defiance
of the burning heat of the sun;
but when night comes it reveals
its other nature, a kind of easeful sympathy
in Norfolk, Virginia. The buds
half-close, drawing the cool to us,
for however long it lasts.
We never found out
why the violets turned yellow in autumn,
or why the fig trees gave fruit once, and never again.
And now you can see overhead
the small, plant-like stars beginning
to say goodbye, before anyone
learned their names. And the plant
is called the Quaternary Plant.
It can’t be undone.
Third Letter
Light evolves
an eye.
Flags ascend
into fog that arrived
with the summer comet.
Ahead of us
are the islands
of pine, may-
apple, false foxglove, ivy.
Reversed energy states
cause the violet
to glow.
Have I sung ahead of myself,
the song that goes life, earth, time,
that goes intestines, mind, arms, ferns, dill–
have I seen what
the comet wanted to show me,
the arc of the then-
sun, the what-was-sun,
the true name of which
could transmute my tongue?
The Cauliflowers
After Edith Södergran
At night, in a far-off row of the garden,
the cauliflowers pulse with a faint blue light.
Only you can see it. Only you
can cross the threshold
to cut them at the stalk
with your beautiful knife.
Wait, you cannot take it back!
Stay for a while in the garden—
the cauliflowers are cold to the touch.
