Part One
Ode
Congratulations, rhododendrons, on a job well done
this year. I’m in love
and your flagrant uptick in blooms has confirmed
a kind of religious order in me:
my inside and outside realms are identical.
They completely agree
in tense and tone, in depth, perimeter,
economy, and attention to moisture.
The humidity’s gotten to everything
and everything I can imagine — useless questions
I would voice, wishes I would rather not,
worries — they’re all laid out in plain sight.
From my place on the porch I can see
exactly which way that love will go.
There’s a thousand different routes but they’re all right
in front of me. Today has taken the shape
of a Möbius strip, soft as the porch breeze. As such,
there is only one boundary
and it divides what’s real from what isn’t.
Just between us, I don’t think I’m the one
projecting, rhododendrons. I think you are
excelling at it. Which is fine with me.
It’s not my job to calculate the difference between
my nerves and the white daytime moths,
or the gulp of sparrows tucked into the boxwood dark
and my own throat or lap or the heat of the flock
as it presses into the air. It’s July. It’s hot everywhere.
The tiger lilies jostle and nod. Who here
isn’t doing their best to demonstrate a truly botanical
blind optimism? It’s almost six o’clock.
Is it you or me, rhododendrons,
waiting with our red and pink faces
turned in all directions at once? Is it coincidence
I was walking through this neighbourhood last night
and my friend said rhododendrons were his favourite?
Occasionally, I had to notice, he smiles as thoroughly
as sunlight travels each vein of a leaf.
And then he smiled at me,
and offered to come by again tomorrow,
which is now today. You ruffle, rhododendrons,
and stick out all your necks. You wave as if
winter will never happen. You’re right, it won’t.
Winter is unthinkable now. A zillion flowers cover the sidewalk,
and there’s way more still on the tree, to make sure something’s always
looking up. And someone is crossing the street to me.
Some History of This
If properly wound, the robot friar will pace and kiss
his cross, and clatter out a mea culpa. Then again pace, then kiss —
Between an institution and a cliché, there’s a narrow kitchenette
where a loose tooth and a hulking California strawberry try to reinvent the kiss.
As if to prove nothing changes, we talk nose-to-nose and every word
marks a new halfway point in the race to an infinitely distant kiss.
How do we forgive the guy who’s out there on locust day, waiting to film
the last shaft of wheat that rainbow will bend to kiss?
Tonight’s a drag, thinks the bartender, dumping ice melt from half-empty cups.
The sink’s littered with lemon husks a...