Green

In Green, Marilyn Bowering addresses her physical and metaphysical worlds in conversations that move from the most intimate expressions of longing to the political. Her love of Lorca and Ritsos and Rumi and the years she spent in Spain have seeped into the frames of her poetry, adding another colour to the interplay of form and improvisation that is her canvas. The poems are variations of classical themes and traditions but are driven by the immediacy of family, love and death. Coats, rooms, cars, cups, bees and finally the rose are all part of the dive into the sources of Green.

Now there is peace
of the kind that longing brings:

sleeplessness,
long halts

as I stand on the driveway
broom in hand, not sweeping.

I listen to the trees:

what do they say
but green green?

At last I understand Lorca!
Verde que te quiero verde.

And remember his life in cities
and the cafes
and with his friends hidden
by night;

but most of all
it’s the sweetness of Granada I recall,
even the terrible barranco at Viznar,
full of sedge grasses,

a blue hyacinth its only flower,
where exhausted murderers tried
to eradicate poetry:

Ay amor
Que se fue y no vino!. . .
Ay amor
Que se fue por el aire!

Why think of such sadness?

It flourishes in the bodies
of those we love;
it also needs joy.

*

What remains of the wood?
Ash.
What remains of the river?
Stone.
What remains of the night?
Dark.

Oh gateway—who is at the entrance?
Oh gateway—who holds the door?

The night is a black bird
on the rooftop,
a button in its beak,
under a clear sky.

For the rooftop
there is no gate,

for the river
there is no depth,

for the star
there is no darkness.

I crouch over this paper,
the wind flames it in my hand,
its ink is a black wave
that sands a shore.

How you lie, hand and foot
bound with a thread.
before the tide.

How long will you wait
to untie your hands
and read?

*

Advice for the twenty-first century

When I’m alone, and I remember to ask
at twelve midnight, and at the stroke of 3:00 a.m.,

I’m at some threshold
with a million others,

and the summer fires in the forest
are only light, not pain,

and the world is a murmur of electricity
through the silence.

The house is two countries, only one underfoot;
and the documents and photographs on the table

spring to life, full of hope,
and my longing becomes happiness.

How precious the sweetness of empty night,
and at the same time, the dust quivers

and I want to wash my hands again and again in clean water
and think only of those peacefully sleeping.

(I hear you shout: the weather is all green!
We’re discussing meaning and I can’t sleep.)

So many wounded: every morning the count
is a white pistol shot through my dreams.

Get up, tell about the wreckage—
tell whoever will listen

about all those drunk on technology—

although even they can’t muzzle the bees
or the trees and streams or gravity,

or climb through the smallest black hole—

and we all want honey and clear skies,
and we’re going to cry out

when we’re loved.

I will never reach the sea
ahead of the arrival of waves:

it can’t be done

even by drones searching out targets
with their red mosquito bites of infrared:

don’t let them silence our pillowtalk.
It’s better when I don’t think.

How hard everyone tries not to think.
Don’t try so hard, walk upright

like a human being:

don’t trample the gardens
with hooves you don’t have.

*

From the point of view of the rose,
the bird on its way to its nest
is of no consequence.

The bee, on the other hand,
draws the geometry of sweetness
flower to flower:

distances sway
according to the wind
of an intricate innate ballet:

Only the bird perceives the rose totally.

Put science aside: or bring it close, as if the microscope
and spectrum telescope were the fine hairs
of the bee’s belly, its organs of dalliance—

here’s the romance of attraction, the plus and minus
of eye contact, the medium of brain

like some primordial soup: creation’s about to start
and I’m here, keening,

As not everyone who reads a leaf knows its meaning.

Upturned cup, leaves incised on a hip,
is as good as any means to assess
this attempt to scry the rose,

its scent at one with fingertip:

and look—I’m ready at once—without a shove!—
to dive into the heart: you’re my oxygen
it’s as deep down here as heaven above,

O you who from the book of reason would see the signs of love.

Books! I meant to reference botanical text,
the knife of dissection,

to lead you by degrees
to tear the rose as I instruct:

but—attention deficit be damned—the essay’s lurched
out of my hands:
all I can think,

my senses assailed by love,
is how scant the hours, how profound the dove.

(I fear that you cannot fathom this subtlety
by research.)