Potpourri

I see my wife struggling in the dirt

with her roses and her iris and I watch her

domesticate every mountain within ten miles,

but I know it is the delicate spring things,

the bloodroot and the columbine, that move her.

I think of the great space between her and

the wild domestic poets I hear reading at the Moat

and the Lavender Gate and I understand

exactly the difference between them;

and when I watch her on the flowered sheets

with her eyes finally closed

and her purple T-shirt already wet with sleep

I understand a delicacy and a mournfulness

that neither Nietszche my one love

nor Van Gogh my other

could help me with, for all their knowledge and purity.

Tonight a huge black rose

sits on the oak chest

beside the silver candlesticks

dominating the small room with

its size and odor.

I am sitting down eating strawberries

and turning the rose on its thick stem.

Across the room a potpourri waits,

like a rich grave full of herbs and spices,

for the moist petals;

and under the light a bouquet of wild daisies

with three round thistles on the outer edges

is half buried inside a tin pitcher.

- What I will do after a minute is walk outside

to pluck the strings

and I will feel pleasure in the darkness

that will unite me forever with the sleepless Italians

and the waterless Greeks beside their stone jars.

In the morning we will sit on the metal chairs

and drink coffee and exchange dreams;

tonight I will sit there alone listening to trucks

go up the highway and getting small glimpses

of the sky between the eaves and the black maples.

I will do two things before I go upstairs;

I will see if the thorn tree is still living

and I will put a blue trumpet in my shirt pocket.

On my way in I will practice a little

breathing, a little emptiness,

and I will listen to the crazy night bird

with my hand against the pillar and my head bowed

so I can lie down in wisdom and luxury.