Читать книгу Words for Trees - Barbara Folkart - Страница 7
ОглавлениеNo love here,
not a leaf or a light
as you pass,
just the relentless rhythms of stone—
shoreline, stepped terraces, petrified trees,
the angry roil of mountains in the dusk,
the sea glaciered
into a heat death all its own.
How private, those cities you pass by,
walled in tight and self-contained—
good burghers counting coins
on kitchen tables
after parsimonious suppers,
preparing for bed, for the night's
cautious coitus, prudently
carnal, leery of the passions.
A tight little wind stings
through the bare trees.
The year shrivels and a moonless cobalt
night falls onto you out of the sky.
You in your cobalt dress hurry
westward, into the dark,
that light around your head
growing dimmer with each step.
Love Song from a Medieval Manuscript
Tender as snow peas
in that fragile pea-pod boat of theirs,
they sing and strum
their way across their miniature lake,
soprano, sopranino, alto.
What will he do,
they wonder,
what will love be like
a l’ombre d’ung buysonnet? what mysteries, what marvels beneath the boxwood hedge, or lying in the lilacs’ shade?
They redden at the thought of it,
their hands suddenly
trembling on the strings,
all of a sudden a violent
new tenderness at the tips
of their small new breasts.
Their voices rise clear
and unvibratoed
across the lake, pure
as lark calls, simple as water,
soprano, sopranino, alto,
and the blackbirds answer.
And they wonder
what it will be like
to lie with him
beneath the lilacs, in the noon
scorch of the vineyards,
in the cool black shade of the oaks…
It’s dappling all around,
the light is dizzying through the birches,
shards of sunlight quivering the underbellies of the leaves,
the pines breathing their resinous breath—
and in the midst of all this blue,
this dazzle and mottle,
Camille, partridge-plump,
diaphanous in flocked organza
flounced out around her on the grass,
Camille offering her pleasures—
pâté en croûte, to be sure, and poached salmon,
roast chicken, Beaujolais and white Bordeaux,
a tumble of peaches and grapes
and small cheeses spilling
off the irised cloth onto the grass—
but riper still, the promise of her languid
face and throat, her full breasts
for after, under the far-off fir trees,
in the drone of the sated afternoon.
Cool, cerebral, translucid,
the oak-green woods haven
three figures lifted from a classical engraving—
one left naked (though changed into a woman),
the others given beards and frock coats,
a tasselled cap, a riding crop.
The woman, smooth-surfaced and serene,
centres with her apricot flesh the chestnut-greens
and russets of these Ovidian woods.
Her eyes meet ours—
fraternal, brown, companionable,
full of a painterly intelligence
that forestalls lust.
That full-fleshedness of hers, her nakedness,
her plain and competent body—
stable, large-footed, with the big toe sticking out-
offer no crannies for our yearnings to take root in,
our desires, our unhealable lacks.
Envy them the closure of their woods
the reassurance of the flesh,
simple and safe, spared love and need—
just flesh, no fury, lack, or yearning.
It’s springtime—come, my pretty friend,
let’s lie under the greenwood tree.
The hens are clucking, full and round,
dawn is crinkling the rosy sky:
love is coming to claim your hand.
Mars and Venus are back again,
mouth storming mouth; their kisses scald
through vineyard, orchard, sun-scorched plain.
Roses and strawberry vines run wild,
rosy young gods make naked fun.
Come! It’s my tenderness that rules
the new spring flowering all around.
Nature’s in love, all birdkind shrills,
Pan goes a-whistling as he bounds,
the tree frogs chant their wet green calls.
Love died making love in your bed:
Do you remember that rendezvous?
Love died, you’ll raise him from the dead:
He’s coming back to fondle you.
Another spring has gone its way,
Lilacked, and tulipful, and tender.
Adieu, green season, on your way!
Bring back next year your splendour.
In the Botanical Gardens of Paris
(after Henri Julien Rousseau, the Douanier)
The lindens along the gravel paths
chatter and froth,
dark green, lime-green,
more longing,
here in the fifth arrondissement of Paris,
than anywhere else on earth
(though this you can’t have known,
you who in Île-de-France
yearned for Africa…)
They haunt you, these everyday
lindens, but you move on,
desire bending you toward the exotic things
cosseted in hothouses
or caged behind moats.
You stray from the gravel path,
take your chances in the labyrinth,
attentive to angry blarings from the elephant rotunda,
half smelling the hot lurk of lion,
the feral sweat of tiger
escaped into the boxwood hedges…
But all goes well today. Safe through the labyrinth,
you come to the winter garden,
where your eye will gorge itself
on jewel orchids and cattleyas,
succulents with fleshy leaves,
banyans and baobabs acclimated
in clay pots to the botanists’
chastely ordered
concept of the tropics
specimens, all,
neatly potted, pruned,
well-fed, and Latin-labelled.
But you see Africa and Mexico
in the curve of an acacia leaf,
your eye releases in each plant the wildness
it had half forgotten here in Paris.
Here, in the winter garden,
in the ecstasy of the eye on its object,
desire leafs into its own:
these pods, bracts, stems,
the twistings of these captive roots
suffice to feed the yearning that inhabits you.
Outside, the optical clock chimes in its kiosk:
noon drops its plumb line down
through lens after lens,
refracts and tintinnabulates
light into sound:
order, in the prism of your eye,
reverts to art.
The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
(after Odilon Redon)
Tremor of watercolour, tremble of the saint
sagging in ecstasy against his tree,
long white nakedness bondaged
to bare blue bark.
Arrowed with desire,
quivered through and through,
he shudders against his birch:
the woods flood with purples
pitched higher
and higher, mauves fusing
into lavenders, rose, molten
golds, the air keening
as his flesh flowers into light.
(after Henri Matisse)
The world outside exults and effervesces,
the sky, through your window, a strident smear of crayon,
geraniums rioting through your wrought-iron balcony.
In this room, though, time stills to a trance of desire
and you, in your thin silk caftan, dream,
his letter in your hand. Perfumed
and ready in the silk that whispers
lasciviously along your long white body,
you dream him in the earth colours of his flesh—
eyes lips nipples engorgement—the tendrils
in your own groin growing damp, your breasts dewy
with sandalwood, and that other dew
forming in you already. And you wait
by the elegant, the implacable black door
through which he will come to claim you,
needing his touch to unspell you
from the vegetative rhythms of desire, release
you into the June day raging in the garden.
(after Edouard Manet)
In his evening dress,
he’s the dark
of the painting,
the sombre, light-absorbing foil
for Nana’s luminous undress.
Propertied, he appraises her,
eyes level with her rump. Cocks
his cane, his cardiac stare
on the opulent flesh blooming
below her strangled waist-
One flick of the cane,his hand is thinking…
She’s paying no attention.
Why would she, with all that light
spilling out of her?
Preening in her blue corset
cinched tight tight
to celebrate her breasts and hips,
she’s all abundance—
auburn hair fleshy-milky arms
rice-powdered cheeks—
all embonpoint and petulant flesh.
What does she care about his lack,
this man of property, who only owns?
