Not photosynthesis
but some such science
breaks the diurnal flower’s
sleep seal
when the morning sun
crests the horizon
and warms
the petals
of the hoarded poem
each flange
of font
each curve
of letter language
Here.
Here is my life
unfurled. I cling to my words’
brief blossom
a lifeboat
an answer.

***

Response to Mary Oliver’s “Flare” from The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem
(Da Capo Press, 2000)

The poem is not the world.
It isn’t even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.
It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,
like the door of a little temple,
so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,
and less yourself than part of everything.

—Mary Oliver

There’s no way back believe me/
I’m writing you from there.

~Jorie Graham

I’ve been using you. I’ll fess up. I’ll play it as it lays. I’ve used you to feel significant again, to shine brighter than my own flat self. A penny no matter how tarnished gleams after time on the train track. A balloon is no fun without air. But now I feel myself slipping, just one last grain of sand slipping down the slick funnel, just one skyscraper lost in a horizon of metal and glass. Once the Chrysler Building was the shit, you know, the bees’ knees. Once it held significance. Now it is a hobby horse I still ride, a strawman I’ll argue as if I could win, if only I knew what I was arguing for. I feel small, there I’ve said it. I am dwarfed by the looming statues of twin monoliths: cancer and disability. I hate to say it but maybe I am Fitzgerald’s goddamn boat. (How many of the faint-hearted have claimed the same?) I am buffeted, and the green light, well I’m rowing against more than the current, more than the wind. I am rowing against anonymity. I heard love ride the air like an echo, and I chased it. I cupped it like water in my palm. Dare I say I am the rainbow that needs more than to be the treasure itself? I thought to have love was to be something at a time when I was nothing more than a plate for food, a table for the plate, the floor for the table, the earth for the floor. Settle it all upon me and I won’t shift, won’t tire. But take me for granted and I’ll forget I’m here. I’ll forget that maybe I was supposed to be dessert, if only someone had thought to take a bite. Still I will be sweet. I can hardly complain. There’s no telling what else could go wrong if I so much as make a peep. I am both the girl and the closet. The baby and the blanket. I am absence. I am the dark. And maybe it’s enough to be a thought, a star long extinguished and glinting only as memory. Careful. If you blink, I might miss me.