for Christina Pugh
Lyric one of Stardust Media, you invited us to relish all manner of living things in this instance of human—summer draped with convolvulus vines, Solomon’s seal, blue-flowering squill across a zinnia bed, and the dazzling faces of dahlia, those geometric origami stars.
In the day room, an indigo orchid stood motionless as a bearded gnome, and the monograph offered its pages like old wallpaper—here a blue jay’s wing spread wide as an ink blot, there a horseshoe crab with its miracle blood, or an enormous eye, somber as a noun—afloat on an unfluted podium as if scriptural.
For miles, the lake poured
its azure joy into the basin,
no trace of thunderheads.
Soon all the bright, green things will migrate from the garden indoors, even the begonia with her speared, heart-shaped leaves, and the potted vanilla lavishly spilling her aerial roots yet withholding her blooms like blotted stars yet to bear light.
An inverted bicycle was in the air, suspended like a bell chime—memory revises our very existence, inviting satisfying draughts afterward, a deep spring—it was not, yet there it was, invisible spokes real as a dish of grape leaves and rice with a hint of cumin.
How we ate out of this plenitude, a feast of little dishes—the marooned fruit of the olive tree; the cucumber slices in sweetened vinegar; buttery dough filled with spinach; intact figs so flawless, we bit down to the stems; lettuce out of the air—
as if the pages of summer
disclosed herself in every ruffle,
every sateen leaf.
If you look around, the foliage is already sepia like a silent film or silk with decades of human wear, no less than beautiful than a mother whose name is Sybil, prophetess of foresight who chose a book about a rose and a verb before she knew about our reunion.
Poetry, like love, is not a zero-sum game. A spirit of communitas revived us, this afternoon, just enough of a good thing like the Eucharistic host, one wafer for each person, enough for everyone in the room.
Let’s share it like Emi
and her endless gift of sencha tea—
not too grassy, never too much.