Ode
K U RT L E L A N D Ode Leaves of three, let it be. —Folk Proverb Spiteful congregation of inhuman hands! Your stirs, your frantic genuflections with each wind’s passing, revert to a wrinkled green vellum’s soothing eyeful, whose chance-brushed illuminated scriptures, written on innocent skin in invisible ink, will emerge in a week: the purgatorial itch of ire divine love loves to bestow on all who trespass against it. Your trinity makes me think, spreading the month-long frissons of its anointing oils, that God is that spiritual discomfort whose blistering center is everywhere, the balm of whose circumference nowhere. Each fall, when leaf smoke roils the burnt offerings of unwantedness skyward and your bread-white flowers have become a waxy inedible berry-flesh, forewarned about the grudge that the fenced-in yards’ fire-brand-bearing guardian your foliage is holds against us— an auto-da-fé one can truly glimpse hell through— I shiver at what the rashness of burning you would inflict on the soul: an orogenesis The 2000s ❚ 255 raising its cordilleras, cutaneous crusts and domed lava-pools, its bursting volcanics, intolerable epidermal plate tectonics above weeping rivers of serum, the pink rusts of Calamine’s bentonite magma. No wonder my best friend’s three-year-old daughter, shown just once your tree-twined red blaze in the backyard’s Eden, refers now to maples and sweetgums as poison. Saviour in childhood from the hated summer-camp swim lessons, recruiter of mothers to a lay priestesshood of scrapings, gauze wraps, and lotions—how we stood your mostly pointless perpetual temptations to touch ourselves in all the wrong ways I don’t know. The weight of water as it drops from the showerhead onto that swelled spot on my shin’s a pleasure as sexual as any deity’s sin. So, much as I loathe your effects, at times I can’t see why you never became some ancient faith’s holly, hedging the sacred with untouchability: in the sun-burning bush, my God’s poison ivy. 256 ❚ The 2000s ...
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