How exquisite:
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
...
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Not ...
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.
How easily the city is lost
How easily the city is lost, leaves me
to see only what's at hand: a sliver
of red brick and mortar, a pigeon roosting
on the rain-slick railing, a postcard of the Penitent
Magdalene by George de La Tour. Under fog
the world attempts disappearance. Even desire
tissues to smoke in the steamy kitchen of the sky.
This day a reprieve: a thick cream
of mushroom. Anticipateds slip
my mind. The morning-scent of coffee
and bread are all I need. In Mary's mirror
a single flame blossoms from a single candle.
She looks away from it, from the picture plane--
which is to say, from the physical. She hungers
for no thing. An idea of the ideal is nothing
we can see. What happens if we are not
surpassed by some Absolute, something shapeless?
What happens if we are not transported?
Her face cleaving -- half in, half out -- the candle's
juniper of light. On her vanity a putty-coloured skull,
the delicate white beads. Her arm pure, moony,
marionette; the folds of her gown sculptured.
This is an arrangement of light and shade, a clair-obscure,
We need shape to know we are living --
which is to say, the phenomenal: potatoes sung by earth,
a sallow moon clinging to a tree, are of a bruised knee.
Archimedes, the story goes, measured even a grain
of sand, anxious to know how many grains were needed
to fill the universe. There is never a shortage of
yearning. I want to be among things
that bloom although I do not love flowers.
Magdalene, how you glow, how let go, loosened
in the brilliant darkness. Once I wore only black
by which I meant emptiness. Now I wear blue.
When will I pass through what I love
into the fog, the meaningless, the truly beautiful?
Yerra Sugarman |
