Five Poems
by
Judith
Searle
In
the Teeth of Time
Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"
The violinist is dying, the pianist is dying, all of us
in this high-ceilinged room on our chairs are dying.
The roses in the sunlight streaming through the windows
are dying, though their scent is strong.
Outside a dog howls as the violin pours forth
its intricate filigree, its amazing leaps and moans.
Poor howling dog, howling for all of us sitting here
on this Sunday afternoon in the teeth of time.
We are forever brothers and sisters,
held together in this womb, birthed
through the throes of the music into the sunlight.
We howl with pain and joy.
This musk of mortality mixes with the fragrance of the roses.
The moans and sobs of the violin are indistinguishable
from the blood leaping in our veins on this
Sunday afternoon in the kingdom of forever.
The cutting edge of time is essential to the ecstasy.
The performers are our high priests, flinging themselves
into the silence to bring back treasures for the tribe,
which we devour in this ritual communion.
We ride their backs as if on dolphins,
soaring into the sunlight scattering diamonds,
plunging through the depths, lungs bursting,
our exuberance edged with panic.
In this moment of alchemy, discipline is inseparable from freedom,
fierceness from tenderness, focus from abandonment.
The music is a lover with a hundred hands, and we are reeling
with the sudden touch of sound after a moment of silence.
Worth it to be mortal on a day like this,
with the sunlight, the roses,
the music rising to heaven, swooping back
to earth, our vehicle to eternity.
Instructions
to the Florist
for
Basil
In
the spirit of Southern California, this bouquet must be lavish:
Startling as crimson bougainvillea on a slate roof,
Absurd as a street lined with poodle-tail palms,
Dignified as rows of magnolias marching toward the Pacific,
Sensuous as the fragrance of verbena on the night wind,
Cheerful as the double yellow hibiscus,
Nonchalant as the raggedy hobo eucalyptus,
Delicate as baby's breath,
Improbable as bird-of-paradise,
Fresh as the white spikes of amazed daisies,
Fantastic as an avenue of flowering jacarandas,
Graceful as coral trees doing their arboreal t'ai chi chu'an,
Unassuming as woolly bachelor buttons escorting flamboyant pink snapdragons,
Exotic as branches of pale-green orchids striped with russet,
Languorous as lilacs,
Gay as a carpet of nasturtiums,
Imperious as a pot of white chrysanthemums,
Comical as bottle-brush trees scouring the air,
Subtle as fiddlehead ferns uncurling,
Blatant as the metallic magenta of succulents,
Elegant as calla lilies,
Inscrutable as the oriental faces of pansies,
Homely as geraniums on an adobe balcony,
Tenacious as live-oaks,
Sophisticated as bushes of red-and-white camellias,
Giddy as a field of breeze-blown poppies,
Soporific as the scent of crushed gardenias,
Refreshing as the shade of cedars,
Aromatic as fresh basil,
Noble as the delphinium, rising like a lover to his love,
Open as the velvet heart of the full-blown rose.
On A
New York City Bus
I
catch the eye of a woman:
round white beret,
round gray-tinted glasses,
framed in a round mirror
near the door:
an urban cameo,
myself.
Then another self
one year old:
hostile, strange, innocent--
Mother at my left staring at the camera
with the same eyes that look at me now
from the circular mirror
but tired, undercircled.
No angry cherub disturbs my sleep, Mother,
but still in these years of absence
I dream of you: Death
is a word in a foreign language,
a word I keep forgetting.
You have become an expatriate merely
abandoning the country of my waking
for the country of my sleeping.
Still I wonder, staring
at this liberated creature
in the round mirror
on a New York City bus:
can you forgive me
for breaking the circle?
Pruning
It is winter in Santa Monica
and the bronze bust of
Arcadia Bandini de Baker watches
as the slender man with a blonde pony tail
amputates every leafy branch
until the circular rose garden resembles
the worst ward in a veteran's hospital.
Arcadia appears unmoved by the carnage,
accustomed to witnessing four prunings a year.
Having followed the cycle for some years
myself, I know that in a few weeks
green shoots will emerge from
these gray stumps and grow an inch a day
to produce new buds in a month.
I wonder if this industrious gardener
ever feels anxious, cutting
his bushes back so ruthlessly.
As if God should suddenly wonder,
after floods in Bangladesh,
famine in Ethiopia, a bomb in Hiroshima,
whether Death was such a good idea, after all.
And
what if the decree went out:
There shall be no more Death.
A general reprieve for both roses and humans.
How long before the proliferation of roses
became a blight and humans resorted
to shipping their aged
to colonies on the moon?
Those few left in earthly nursing homes
would plead for Death
as the Cumaean Sibyl is said to have done
after Apollo granted her wish for eternal life
and left her, shriveled in her bottle,
to face an eternity of regret
for her failure to request eternal youth.
Without Death, medicine would have no enemy,
the military no power to threaten.
Adam and Eve, restored to the Garden of Eden,
would probably choose not to reproduce.
Philosophy and art would cease once immortality
became automatic and Op-Ed pages would proclaim
the absence of Death a tragedy.
Eventually some means of reinstituting Death
would have to be found.
Humans would heave a collective sigh of relief,
resume pruning their roses, birthing their offspring,
producing poems and paintings and music
to fling a gauntlet in the face
of the grim, welcome reaper.
A Rose
Garden
In
a rose garden, circular,
moving from bush to bush
I feast my senses
on opening blossoms, buds
and blowsy spent beauties.
Each color has its own aroma--
yellow exuding lemon verbena,
true rose blaring at perfect pitch,
black-red voluptuous and musky.
In the center, a fountain--
water exploding upward, reaching
the limit of its exuberance, falling,
tinkling into the basin that overflows
into a larger pool with a deeper sound,
flute against cello.
As I watch the water droplets at their peak
sparkle for an instant in the sunlight,
then arc downward to conjoin with fellows
in the depths of the pool,
I imagine our souls in dying
nestling this way among our ancestors,
moving from painful and exuberant isolation
to seamless connection with our essence.
I say this prayer for myself
and those I love:
May our life be a journey through a rose garden,
our death like water falling into water.
(back
to contents)