EVEN THE TINIEST WILDFLOWER IN THE WOOD

EVEN THE TINIEST WILDFLOWER IN THE WOOD

Even the tiniest wildflower in the wood

tangled in the shadows of the grass,

smaller than an insect, a lonely diminutive yellow,

five sounding flukes of pygmy whales for petals,

is a starmap to the whole universe

shining back at itself, the invisible made manifest,

by swimming against the current of the light.

It’s just as much the obstructions in life

that show you the way, the lost key, chance, hope,

the door you’re only allowed to live on one side of,

the tree root of the willow in the garden

you’re chopping at like the tentacle of an octopus

with a double-bladed axe that reminds you of the moon

as it is the lanterns of the random fireflies

that light your way through the woods

like a chaos of lamp posts and guiding angels.

Maybe you could stand the tentacles straight up

like the towers of the hollyhocks and larkspur

and let them blend in with the rest of the garden?

But that’s a little too wily and wise for me to propose.

And the way you frustrate yourself like whitewater

in a torrent of apple-bloom from the spring run-off

is as long a mile of the journey as the last three lightyears

of flowing freely around the angel in your way

with a gravitational third eye that bends you its way

like Jacob’s hip and Vulcan’s limp, and you’re

mythically inflated enough to begin to suspect

you’re a symbolically crippled sacrificial king or queen

of the Waxing Year. Even the Boy Scouts have forgotten

how to tie themselves into labyrinthine knots

the way you do when you’re not weaving snakepits

into flying carpets like M-theories out of

the stringy wavelengths of guitar-shaped black holes.

Poetic dismemberments are more a way of the one

returning to the many like a river plunging off a precipice

into millions of gleaming eyes, each a window

in a palace of water with a star for a candle inside,

than body parts planted like the ashes of your sister

in a rose garden that blooms for that purpose alone,

though their visions seem heavy and sad

as the bells of abysmal solitudes that have passed

like an era of individuals into the transmorphic anonymity

of a Meta-Conservation of Data Principle

that archives every iris and pixel of your digital fingerprints,

if you were born a poet, you’ll always be that stranger

sitting beside you in the shadows around a fire

telling ghost stories with narrative themes of cedar smoke.

Dynastic Dionysiac plenipotentiaries of the wild grape vines.

Maenads. Muses. Valkyries bobbing for prophetic skulls

in the Aegean like apples off the coast of Lesbos.

Everybody sings along with Sappho after upstaging

their Orphic voice coach. It’s the natural order of things.

Full moons of the mistletoe and dusty blue planets

with wine-dark seas. Barring the F chords on your

lyres and turtle-shells, capos like starlings on the staves

of the hydrolines strung out like a power grid

of bird nets and dreamcatchers in the palm of your hand.

You want to glimpse the quick of it, don’t drive yourself crazy

trying to understand. Just dance to the rush of the river

over the rocks like castanets. Love disastrously, with no regrets.

PATRICK WHITE