I asked every flower I met
had they seen my palest friend.
The chant of the roots will beget
petals that blazon and bend
and erasable eyes to forget
the sun and the storm and the wind,
the sky which wheels in its net,
the black of the blurrest portend.
“We see in the sheerest clair
the nothing that vitals and vides.
No friend of your night and your debt
will blight our murmur with seeds
of the mortal flower, regret,
which roots in the arc of the air.
* * *
She goes, she is, she wakes the waters
primed in their wave-form, a flux of urge
struck into oneness, the solid surge
seeking completion, and strikes and shatters
and is its fragments, distinction’s daughters—
and now, unholding, the cleave and merge
the hew and fusing, plundering the verge
and substance is the scheme it scatters
and what it numbers in substantial sun.
Her hands hold many or her hands hold none.
And diving the salt will kiss a convex eye
and be salt fact and be the bodied sky
and that gray weight is both or beggared one,
a dead dimensional, or blue begun.
