VI. i

The Imperial Rose Garden and its plush jungle flora
	Imitate what Sappho loved -- this red, blushed
Majesty, cascading dastardly in patchwork patterns
	That mirror triangulated, assassins' gunfire.
Magenta, scarlet, fragile pink, noir, and white,
	The roses mass perplexingly complex in tinge--
Like a political party of Machiavellian intent.
	But forget policy! Enjoy rouge-gorgeous air,
Smelling also of perfumed decay like a bordello,
	That stench of bedsheets after coitus
(Rank sweat and drool, ointments and condiments),
	Amid dog hair strewn like strychnine to scare off
Impresisonable deer, and the light sluicing down
	Like loose juice, a strew of drenching spunk.
Jewels of insects glitter amid the pulp and juice
	Of russet pears, sapped, crushed, but teeming 
Also with maggots as fierce as asps. Nearby, bees
	Burrow into the gragrant, pouting vaginas
Of impious flowers, dousing themselves with nectar--
	Delicious, sopping--until they resemble
Lavishly lolling lovers, busy with queynte-moistened
	Faces. Leave them and go down the plank walk
Among the elephant grass (or Norfolk reed) to spy
	The dead railroad bridge--all rusted iron and 
Rotting wood, a Canuck Stonehenge, a paean
	To Confederation's steady decay. Look! A gang
Of crows parliaments the telephone lines. They are
	Like honourable members nodding stolidly
At each other, "ahem"-ing and "amen"-ing about
	Their ingenious and eternal pension plans.
The sky is sapphire broken by grey-white shards,
	But the ground stinks of dying apples, berries,
Smelling much like March and April with their vernal
	Muck. A mosquito zeroes in among shadowy, 
Gold-streaked, man-tall, zebra glass clusters, while I'm
	Watching bulrushes salute overbearing
Sky-fucking trees such as the Populus Caroliniana
	(or Carolinian Poplar), which looks nine-storeys
High, at least four-feet thick, and now, where this ink
	Is smudged, that reckless mosquito lies wrecked.
I pass a pond, no fresher than it was three years ago
	(Unlike the fresh ejaculation of a line),
Mid-September, in Annapolis Royal's Historic Gardens.
	Hear the fizz of the mini-waterfall--as quiet
As lethal flowers that have no scent. Here is a new
	Dragonfly, navigating purple-blue among 
Green-and-gold lily pads and lofty, saw-grass spears.
	Time is aging, time is aging, and is ageless,
While tree limbs rake upward like algebraic formula,
	Composing a jazz of randomness--just like
Our never-finished lines, leaping from direction
	To direction: a vers libre architecture.
Again, now the reek of rot under a thrusting tree--
	The scraggly, straggling, bedraggled arches
Of a flouncing, hydra-headed tree. The sun mirrors it,
	Launching arrows of light, lancing, almost,
The obdurate, darkening clouds, as it surrenders
	To the puny daggers of incensed mosquitoes,
Jabbing us like pens jab paper, pricking, pricking,
	Until ink runs like blood.

The poet is, the poet is,

	A gardener in a graveyard.

by George Eliot Clarke, in Black

Posted by Andrea at May 26, 2006 7:06 PM under Friday Poetry Blogging

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