Does it mean jasmine,
the white flower that blossoms
so fragrant by the midnight lake,
Switzerland, life in quiet,
poetry as a sort of elegant hotel
that lets you, sometimes, sleep free?
What do we know of any flower?

Fresh from the shower a young
person hurried past me, I could feel
the wafture of cleanness, freshness
of natural skin, clothing
just an echo of the real beneath,
the flower beneath all our going,

is that the name of a place,
a waterfall with pale beavers below
engineering as they do a refuge,
the only thing it makes sense to build,
Gloucester Cathedral in late winter snow,
bungalows in Rockaway, Cambaluc.
We know so little of what they know,
flowers, yes, but also the names
we give our children, the names we ride,
we know nothing about the names
that guide us, lead us to the lake, say,

Carl Sauer says Homo is a genus
of the littoral, far from the sea
we wilt and fade, or else like Milarepa
build an ocean out of meditation
and live by its shore in unending light.
There, that’s two names in one argument,
and I still can feel the flutter of the one
who passed me, so quickly, in the dark.

I want to be a genius of the literal,
word by word till I understand
what it means to be a word,
to be a sound that even unspoken
hangs in the air around us
teasing us to remember. Who was
that person, flower, lake, mountain
that even at midnight showed clear
against the sky of the Chablais.
I feel the clean air rustle past me
and say jessamine, night-blooming,
H.D. saw it from her window when
exhausted by comfortable exile
she looked at the outside, and knew
she was home. The flower proved it.
I smelled one too, right there, trying
like a dim scholastic to decide
is this what any flower means?

16 January 2021