On the Way through Virginia (No One Would Dare Nowadays To Use Poetic Names for a State)

 

 

Beside small terraces perched

close to the roofs

some old colonial houses

are hoarding in the back

little gems of walled-in gardens

 

as if there strangely translated

from another world and a different age

and also born from within a long, long-gone gap

in between the double flute that makes a wedge

 

and the breath of Pan and his melancholic tune,

sulking after keen-eyed Syrinx

who stabbed him deeper—

unlike any other nymph—

 

when women, malleable to love

like the air to approaching music,

still carried in them springs

and even knowing fountains—

 

like the very one they had

in that little backyard garden

to which you came

to have a little lunch

 

and where only very few guests

venture out of broad daylight

to strike aglow

an evanescent talk

 

on their lives’ quick canvas

with an impromptu brush—

all the while the shaded ground

rests covered in broad magnolia leaves.

Behold, Two June Dragonflies

 

Behold, two June dragonflies

make love while in flight—

what a lift and consummate act!

 

Then I remembered—

on our Tiffany dusk-shaded vase,

a dragonfly soaring

is mirrored

 

by a winged calix

a violet iris holds up to the sky

against its setting

glowing in orange,

 

and so disclosing the kinship

between the flower and the amatory fly

as if what the one is

the other would become

 

by trading the calisthenics of caress

for deeper, staying calm

or, contrariwise,

 

enduring stillness,

beholden to the ground,

for such supple motion  

and mutual airborn touch,

 

making me think—

were not irises

once dragonflies

or dragonflies

once submerged flowers

 

and doesn’t descent or rise

follow likewise the soul,

making it shed

its former form,

 

and isn’t there likewise

a love of descent

and a love of rising,

 

with the air-born

learning and knowing

of the lightest

and most fleeting touch

 

with water that holds

in its serene eye

so much of darkness

behind dazzling shine,

 

while crowning the head

with a coronet and beams

out of translucent wings?

 

Thus both irises and dragonflies

live in their own ways

with such a bath and element—

between descent and rise.

 

 

As if each of the two as well

still lived—both here and thereafter—

in a strange reenactment

of Osiris and Isis

 

one of whom tried to spell them—

even now to us—

 

in their own

sagacious name.

Forty Winks of Southern June

 

In a harbor of laid-back pose,
To what dinghy, clipper, or yacht
Does she imagine offering
Today her studious welcome?

As though both life and love,
Locked within each other,
Need always to be tasted
And thereby translated—

Such an entrance and its gate
Must remain denied
To those who, without
The other, merely pass by,

Insensible
To those true reveries
And the gripping thoughts
Her smile and glance may drop—

Such as that her tongue's ruddy tip
Is but the rim—her flame's last rhyme—
Just as the wine-red of ripened grapes
Finds its serene reply in her body's sublime white.