WEBVTT

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This is a newer poem and it has
an epigraph from Walt Whitman.

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It's a monologue
and you yourselves

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can decide whether it's a
man or a woman speaking.

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It's a quest story.

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The Orbit, and this
is the epigraph.

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I perceive for all who
are or have been young men

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to tell the secrets of my nights
and days of nights and days

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with men.

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It's raining and the thin
scent of scorched linen

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rises off the streets.

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There was no one
at the pond where

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I lean to watch the water
lilies fill with the rain.

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There's always a debris
of insects floating

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in their garish yellow boats.

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I know beneath the surface
their roots drag for nourishment

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through mold and twigs.

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This unsanitary
loveliness of form is flat

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but these flowers brighten
the gray air just a little

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like half washed childish faces.

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They have a funny smell that
chokes me and reminds me

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of myself.

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Soaking wet I leave
for the museum

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where a large hall is
filled with submarine light.

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The huge canvases shimmer
with the other more ideal

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lilies trembling
blue, pink and green.

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They are luminous and a
faint wash of reflected color

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bathes my face.

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I search every inch of wall
for the swarm of gnats,

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I'm sure he must
have painted in.

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I remember how I
dreamed I was Monet

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going blind and separate in
a hot wool cap one summer

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afternoon.

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I was drawing a single pale
lily at the center of a cerulean

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pond.

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My finger growing
longer and longer white

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hot till it parted the petals
and tipped the cup flower

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to gather water, water that
suddenly froze to blue crystals

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then everything cold and dark.

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I've been looking for
a single phase pellucid

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like that individual pink tipped
flower and water unspecked

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porcelain I imagine
to be surrounded

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by secret lights,
this face of other.

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My gamble that's an entrance
to another world or just a

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trance leading me to ponds.

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Every day I believe this face
turns like a slow clouded moon,

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a Nimbus before rain.

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Maybe just one more
time I'll shut my eyes

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and dream of an almost hairless
chest lowering like a freshly

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painted boat into a
pond with streams that

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lead to a constellation
of unmapped water

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made lovely by bobbing
flowers that whiten like stars

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and open like hands.

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