This is a newer poem and it has an epigraph from Walt Whitman.
It's a monologue and you yourselves
can decide whether it's a man or a woman speaking.
It's a quest story.
The Orbit, and this is the epigraph.
I perceive for all who are or have been young men
to tell the secrets of my nights and days of nights and days
with men.
It's raining and the thin scent of scorched linen
rises off the streets.
There was no one at the pond where
I lean to watch the water lilies fill with the rain.
There's always a debris of insects floating
in their garish yellow boats.
I know beneath the surface their roots drag for nourishment
through mold and twigs.
This unsanitary loveliness of form is flat
but these flowers brighten the gray air just a little
like half washed childish faces.
They have a funny smell that chokes me and reminds me
of myself.
Soaking wet I leave for the museum
where a large hall is filled with submarine light.
The huge canvases shimmer with the other more ideal
lilies trembling blue, pink and green.
They are luminous and a faint wash of reflected color
bathes my face.
I search every inch of wall for the swarm of gnats,
I'm sure he must have painted in.
I remember how I dreamed I was Monet
going blind and separate in a hot wool cap one summer
afternoon.
I was drawing a single pale lily at the center of a cerulean
pond.
My finger growing longer and longer white
hot till it parted the petals and tipped the cup flower
to gather water, water that suddenly froze to blue crystals
then everything cold and dark.
I've been looking for a single phase pellucid
like that individual pink tipped flower and water unspecked
porcelain I imagine to be surrounded
by secret lights, this face of other.
My gamble that's an entrance to another world or just a
trance leading me to ponds.
Every day I believe this face turns like a slow clouded moon,
a Nimbus before rain.
Maybe just one more time I'll shut my eyes
and dream of an almost hairless chest lowering like a freshly
painted boat into a pond with streams that
lead to a constellation of unmapped water
made lovely by bobbing flowers that whiten like stars
and open like hands.