O, to grace, how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be.
Let Thy mercy, like a fetter
bind my wandering heart to Thee.
~ “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”
Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
hummingbird buzzing into the teeming
garden, I’ve followed your dizzy trail
these many years: from bed to bed, down
mountain trails, across oceans, to the last
bergamot flower’s four thin flagons nearly
wilted in the shade. So long I’ve dreamed
of climbing into a harness and zipping
across swaths of hidden forest, where
no one has yet catalogued the dream-shapes
of ferns and flowers beneath the canopy;
or dropping from a little plane with you—
one quick tug, and the pocket of silk
billows up like a mellow flame, its
rustle an ineffable name, to bear me
back down to checkered ground.
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
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- 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
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Grand birthday poem, Luisa! Like that quick swerving and mellow fire–makes me think of the “flaming tongues above” from the song.
Glad you like it, Marly! xo
Oh, this is gorgeous, Luisa! Happy belated birthday; I’m so glad that you and your poems have become a part of my world.
(Thanks, Dave. :-)
I should add that I wasn’t even thinking of the aptness of another hummingbird observation yesterday morning when I blogged at the Morning Porch. (It would probably be a very bad practice if I started letting expectations of what Luisa might or might not use influence what I wrote about.) But as anyone who’s been following her poems at Via Negativa will know, she seems to have a special bond with hummingbirds (though not, I gather, quite as close as her bond with lizards).
Thank you, Rachel. I’m grateful for all the new— and rich— connections I make here!
My poem response to Luisa’s “Dear Reckless…” is posted at: http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/09/couple-of-dreams.html and in the Facebook.