All is gold and green in the garden now,
all humid earth beneath a profusion
of honeysuckle. The brass bell in the tree
is quieter than the foragers that come
tracing deliberate arcs through the foliage,
intent on water or sugar or seed. And I,
I want to sort through the inchoate
tumble of words I’ve written and erased,
erased and written again. My mouth
is heavy with salt, numb from wanting even
a drop of honey. And I want so much to tell you
but don’t know how: perhaps this is the only
way to go on: this never-ceasing work
of cobbling from what was given as loss, regret,
or sorrow: pushing it back into the soil, laying it
out in the sun. The coneflower stem breaks under
the goldfinch’s weight, but he moves to another,
probing the darkest center for a hint of seed.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Hello, Luisa–cobbling together that manuscript is on your mind, I see! Plenty of seed there, in the dark…
Lovely. I am always impressed at how effortless your cobbling appears.
Happy 4th to you, Marly and Robbi… and all readers out there. :)
FINDING THE SEED
Let this little garden host your cobbling,
lay them out in the sun. How inchoate
could words ever get when said? Not even
in sorrow or regret. Would loss shear them
of irreversible years of wanting? It is there.
It is always there. But like the mother
of pearl, you forgive that hurt to nourish
what was beautiful then and a stunning
gem now. Like these saplings pushing out
of grounds where as seeds they might
have burrowed into soil absent of tiller,
let them grow rampant. Wild and free
as the wind, they will one day grow strong
branches, refuge of the lost and the winged
warblers that will sing your hammock
songs until you drift into a quiet slumber
from which you will finally wake up to find
him there, caressing your face. Knowing.
Finding the seed that has always been there.
—Albert B. Casuga
07-04-11
Happy 4th to all of you on the Porch and the Via!