As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,
As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,
And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, comes flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.
-- Wallace Stevens
They would be difficult to tell apart, except
That one of them sails as a single body of flowing
Gray-violet and purple-brown flashes of sun, in and out
Across the steady sky. And one of them brushes
In ruffled flukes and wrinkled sepals constantly
Against the salt-smooth skin of the other as it swims past
And one of them possesses a radiant indigo moment
Deep beneath its lidded crux into which the curious
Might stare.
In the early morning sun, however, both are equally
Colored and silently sung in orange. And both gather
And promote white prairie gulls which call
And circle and soar about them, diving occcasionally
To nip the microscopic snails from their brows.
And both intuitively perceive the patterns
Of webs and courseways, the identical blue-glass
Hairs of connective spiders and blood
Laced across their crystal skin.
If someone may assume that the iris at midnight sways
And bends, attempting to focus the North Star
Exactly at the blue-tinged center of its pale stem,
Then someone may also imagine how the whale rolls
And turns straining to align its narrow eye
At midnight, the bright star-point of Polaris.
And doesn't the iris, by its memory of whale,
Straighten its bladed leaves like rows of baleen
Open in the sun? And doesn't the whale, rising
To the surface, breathe in the cupped space
Of the iris it remembers inside its breast?
If they hadn't been found naturally together,
Who would ever have though to say: The lunge
Of the breaching whale is the fragile dream
Of the spring iris at dawn; the root of the iris
Is the whale's hard wish for careful hands finding
The earth on their own?
It is only by this juxtaposition we can know
That someone exceptional, in a moment of abandon,
Pressing fresh iris to his face in the dark,
Has taken the whale completely into his heart;
That someone of abandon, in an exceptional moment,
Sitting aside the whale's great sounding spine,
Has been taken down into the quiet heart
Of the iris, that someone imagining a field
Completely abandoned by the iris and whale can then see
The absense of the exceptional backbone arching
In purple through dark flowers against the evening sky,
Can see how that union of certainty which only exists
By the heart within the whale within the flower rising
Within the breaching heart within the heart centered
Within the star-point of the field's only buoyant heart
Is so clearly and tragically missing there.
Pattiann Rogers.