Of Beauty

Of Beauty

for Mrs. E. Couchman

   

everything else is provisional,

                                us and all our works.

I guess that’s why we like it here:

                listen -- a brief lull

                                                a rock pipit’s seed-small notes.

                                                                                Kathleen Jamie

 Fainuis

                                                                                 

In this, and every spring--late--the clematis

climbs her laddered trellis like the sky

is where the gravity is, like light

writes her name in dust and wind

and she must summit to see it

for herself.  Every day I watch

the way her blossoms, once a green

pod, (and before that, I imagine,

in winter,

beneath

the frost

and sod)

unlock the sarong and tip out

into the day the way a fawn may,

brand new to this perilous world.  Looking

close, the delicate petal resembles,

in vein and patience, a dragon

fly’s wing, taking all the sun and rain

of the day and night this late spring doles

to everything in my meager garden: it

makes me wonder, and don’t you

too wonder, if the bloom needs to know

it’s beautiful, like a girl sitting at her vanity

who composes herself and straightens  in the face

at footsteps, who tips her ear the way

that diminutive deer tips his little hoof and his own

little ear under the warm crown of his mother’s

belly and how her nose comes round

to lick that flicking ear, to taste

the fields of his small exile on her tongue

and breathe in her absolute

devotion, isn’t he more beautiful

in this halo, isn’t the girl more

beautiful knowing she is loved

and doesn’t the clematis bloom

with absolute abandon BECAUSE

someone has tipped into its light

to say so, to lean close to its vein

and rain soaked face and say

You are!  You just are!  And thank you.