Well, this might--
I can't just cut the poem in half, so--
this one's called "Hello, the Roses."
"My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body,
according to the same laws by which stars shine,
communicating with my body by emanation.
It is a source of sentience for the visible and invisible,
etheric, and including unexpressed feelings of others
beyond what is physically plausible.
When you see her, you feel the impact of what visual can mean.
An invisible part comes through of deep pink or a color
I see clairvoyantly.
This felt sense of seeing the rose
extends because light in the DNA of my cells
receives light frequencies of the flower as a hologram.
An entire rose, petals in moving air,
emotion of perfume records as a sphere,
so when I recall the emotion, I touch dimensionality.
From a small bud emerges a tight-wound bundle
of baby skin coral petals, held in a perfect half globe,
as if by cupped hands.
Then, petals are innumerable, loose, double, sumptuous,
unified.
I look through parted fingers to soften
my gaze and slow light shining off the object is filtered.
Then with feeling, I look at swift color there.
It's swiftness yet seems still as noon light because my seeing
travels at the same speed.
I make a reciprocal balance between light falling on
to the back of my eye, to optic nerve,
to pineal gland, a radiant stepping down
of light into matter and awareness of my future self
opening out from this sight.
The moment extends into time passing
as sense impression of a rose, including new joys, where
imagined roses, roses I haven't yet seen or seen in books,
record as my experience.
Then, experience is revelation because plants and people have
in their cells particles of light that
can become coherent, that radiate out physically and also
with the creativity of metaphor as in a beam
of light holographically, that is,
by intuition, in which I inhale the perfume of the bourbon
rose, then try to separate what is scent, sense,
and what you call memory.
What is emotion?
Where in a dialogue, like touching,
is it so vibratory and so absorbant
of my attention and longing with impressions like fingerprints
all over.
I'm saying physical perception is the data of my embodiment,
whereas for the rose, scarlet itself is matter.
The rose communicates instantly with the woman
by sight, collapsing its boundaries,
and the woman widens her boundaries.
Her rate of perception slows down because of its complexity.
There is a feeling of touching and being
touched, the shadings of color she can sense from touch.
There's an affinity between awareness and blossom.
The rose symbolizes the light of this self-affinity.
I come to visit drooping white cabbage roses at dusk.
That corner of the garden glows with a quality of light
I might see when light shines through mist
or in early morning reflects off water.
I stand quietly and allow this quality
to permeate the air around me.
Here, with a white rose, color is clairsentient,
this color in the process of being expressed,
like seeing Venus in the day."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]