The Trumpetvine Clarions to the Honeybees, and: Three Lauds, and: A Benediction: On the Tulpenwoede of Seventeenth-Century Holland, and: The Lord God Bird (Campephilus principalis)
Rent from DeepDyve- The Trumpetvine Clarions to the Honeybees, and: Three Lauds, and: A Benediction: On the Tulpenwoede of Seventeenth-Century Holland, and: The Lord God Bird (Campephilus principalis)
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- The Trumpetvine Clarions to the Honeybees
Another season on beautiful fire. Another hummingbird needles the bloom- swung branches of my plum tree, his bleeding heart of feathers beating at such speed it seems unbeating, and in the sun’s unclouding the tanager’s intemperate plumage flickers at the tree’s equator. This spring came on too much like dawn: all at once with too much noise and color, the sun so bright the dead are getting jumpy, upkindling like pasqueflowers when the green current starts to tendril through the deciduous flesh of them. So fierce these early-season stirrings that I envy them, the dead, whose ardor is dispersed and muted by the intermediary soil. . . . My senses sway all the way down to the bone even on dull-lighted days, but O!—spring ignites that fuse which, as it five-alarms up the middle of me, would consume those blooms, the flash-feathered tanager, the plum-stained hummingbird, his luscious and breakneck heart, the very sun. Elemental, irresistible, spring thrusts its coal into my mouth, and I suck. Bring on the reckoning: already, every spring—every noon!— I burn like judgment day. [End Page 26]
- Three Lauds
1. Praise to the Joshua, that awkward knob of spikes, how they jostle the horizon like a desert of elbows.
2. Praise, say we who are assembled here at this rest stop to this rest stop, its stainless washroom basin the last for ninety miles. Praise to the freshwater spigot, the gravel path winding along and away from the asphalt to the only tree in sight. An ash, shading a pool of grass.
3. Praise to the bareknuckle sun, whose glory is to stun us with our own precariousness. So much light and heat here, where the car top sears the thumbprint from the thumb, and the throat’s reservoirs parch. Praise, for praise is a punchback, in the song-shimmered air a shadow the shape of the sun. [End Page 27]
- A Benediction: On the Tulpenwoede of Seventeenth-Century Holland
Blessed be the disease—the virus subtle plunging to the heart of every bulb to break as streaks and flames through the conservatory, waxy petals freaked with frantic pinks and periwinkles. Blessed be the rankle that stains its mosaic cell to cell, forcing through each blowsy stem-heavy bloom color undreamed by the feyest confectioner until the very air seems motley. Blessed the collectors infected by desire: how they want; how they lick their lips as if they would devour at the bud each sudden new original and its exponential next; how they settle for a name that they can hold between the teeth, biting down against this infinite variety. And blessed, o blessed all those names, all the neat rows of them in the ledger a dear anthology of failures: the Semper Fidelis subsides to the Fidelis in a season, the Admiral mutates to Admiration. Blessed that rage to corner the rarest cultivar, to press tight as in a book each beauty made beautiful by its not enduring. Bookkeeper, I am your daughter, believing that by loving I could hold what I loved, forgetting that I loved because I couldn’t. [End Page 28]
- The Lord God Bird (Campephilus principalis)
Knock-knock on the cracked bark of the sweet gum, And knock-knock in echo through cypresses
Swamp-sunk to their bent knees. The punch line Is that there’s no punch line, only silence
Closing like a cloud around the place Wherefrom you thought you heard me call.
You can yoo-hoo your heart out, I will hidden hold My operatic plumage, fold wings
Over my ivory and my wound-red crown. I will wind so tight myself in feather and fern
That you who’ve tramped years through this tract with your Kodaks, Your boom-mike humming dumbly reel to...
