Lightning Visit
In memoriam Czesław Miłosz
I landed on a lily and entered the calyx
down a spiral staircase of slender smells.
Highlight of honey flowing discreetly.
And the wind that whistled between the points
that birds marked with their tenuous song
that gleams like pearls in an early Rembrandt,
if sounds could gleam, and they did,
here they did! So in a tree there hung a whisper
of wavy gold brocade, and in the grass there trembled
the lament of a stray steppe wolf.
So here what sounded showed itself, here it did!
I sat in a calyx and buzzed
with attention to what was unfolding
under my hands: a languid silhouette
of a girl of course who was laughing
like water in summer past rocky
banks clad with exotic herbs,
and a cloud rose like a swarm
of bees escaping the hive for the
first time, and I too was a part
of wings in the spring, climbed beyond
the possibility of being happy and saw
a fountain that rose guffawing
on a dune that just now was gloomily
drying, and saw how the lily took off its
masks and the wrinkled mug of what was
and is and shall revealed itself.