Blue Flowers

. .. do tend to be associated with

colder climates and greater heights.

Bronowski

Autumn. Light's the world's list.

Over breakfast I think of Linnaeus

j over a taxidermied ocelot body,

a perfect dragonfly under a perfect

tag, a turbot, a marmoset.

The dragonfly already less bright than the |

pins of its systemization. And

by lunch we're at it still, "Remember

the knowing shameful tilt of about

10° you give your head when avoiding all

responsibility," the lucid, detailed, inarguable,

relentless cataloguing

of how it works and doesn't, every

interlocking, every glandular turbine,

the sexual ratchets, thinking's various honeys,

the day shift in the marrow. This

is clarity: assignatory, pure.

Outside, the day accumulates

itself: tree, hosiery, bannister, skin

on skin. A domino at the window: momma

squirrel again, dark teats on buff belly. I

see him in the high, attentive air

of Lapland, 1745, compiling his final

tables, breathing on his hands and naming

absolutely, naming it all, no matter.

Flower in the fields of the flawed

-wild harelip. Brilliant bloom

in the meadows of excellence-diamondcutter's-blow.

Then dinner, then dark. To walk

our late November streets without slipping go

of this strict ticking-off of minutiae, not

yet, no not while the severest sliver of light

lets our lives be our subjects-is to breathe out

pale blue blossoms, the only kind left. Exact,

exacting beauty-the words above which

only lichen lives, and above that only the stars.