Sunburst, Icones Florarum Sanctorumque

I

Clouds, and the fatal arrogance

of this grey, inhuman algebra:

the trees droop, in their passionless dance

under a dank sky, with no signs revealed.

The dark day's blindness is sealed

by the black pitch of rainache over my eyes.

How one wishes for that affirming

celestial serenata,

that will keep this black from confirming

its stamp on me. This expressionless raining,

the foetid, stolid ground remaining

unmoved churn the mind into concrete.

This is nature's sometime bestiality

that, like a mediocre sonata da camera,

it can color me with its obscurantist's reality.

How can I feel this music, how can the will

accept nature's fugue, if it stand still?

Unholy flies and gnats are sleeping on my flesh.

u

Yet you can find your metaphor

in the way things move you,

because somehow you like them,

because somehow you do not like them;

in the way the black rain sometimes glistens,

despite you, how the ground listens

to your footstep, how, because it is uglier than choice,

the will retrieves from this

a darkling beauty. It is gold

on the fly's wings, its purple belly

and incredible gasping eyes,

the sometime shimmer of the dust,

the forest's Wagnerian gesture.

It is the discovery of the saints,

the dazzling flowers on a ground of black gesso.