You want to know how many hours remain
on the fringed lilac faces of these clocks—
Oh take heart, unstrap your sandals, walk by
the shore, leaving the animal that’s lowered
its head to nuzzle wet sculpted sand. And then
come back to lay beneath the windowsill—
You’ll hear the honeybee still sharpening
its rhetoric, the far-off notes made
by bodies nested in burr and fiddlehead fern.
The latch of the gate falls close at evening’s
approach. Its brassy little sound bursts
like a small blue blossom puncturing the dark.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Asters
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
I love the language here, especially the honeybee sharpening her rhetoric. It does seem a little odd to encounter fiddleheads in a poem entitled “Asters,” though I suppose you have your reasons. Still, when fiddleheads unfurl, we are months away from the first burdock burrs.
I wasn’t thinking so much of burdock, but of those little – what do you call them – grass burrs? – that cling to your pants legs when you’re out walking. And in the ecosystems I am familiar with, there isn’t the four-season delineation that we have in the northern hemisphere (instead, only wet and dry seasons).
Here’s a favorite way we enjoy the pako or fiddlehead fern:
http://www.marketmanila.com/archives/pako-fiddlehead-ferns-in-their-natural-state
Oh, right. I wasn’t thinking about your Philippine frame of reference. Of course! I imagine “burr” is applied to quite a lot of things around the world. We call those “beggar ticks” here.