Cactus Seed
Radiant notes piercing my narrow-chested room, beating down through my ceiling’ smeared with unshapen belly-prints of dreams drifted out of old smokes’ trillions of icily peltering notes out of just one canary, all grown to song as a plant to its stalk, from too long craning at a sky-light and a square of second-hand blue.
Silvery-strident throat’
so assiduously serenading my brain,
flinching under
the glittering hail of your notes’
were you not safe behind’¦ rats know what thickness of’¦ plastered wall’¦
I might fathom
your golden delirium
with throttle of finger and thumb
shutting valve of bright song.
II
But if’¦ away off’¦ on a fork of grassed earth
socketing an inlet reach of blue water’¦
if canaries (do they sing out of cages?)
flung such luminous notes,
they would sink in the spirit’¦
lie germinal’¦
housed in the soul as a seed in the earth’¦
to break forth at spring with the crocuses into young smiles
on the mouth.
Or glancing off buoyantly,
radiate notes in one key
with the sparkle of rain-drops
on the petal of a cactus flower
focusing the just-out sun.
Cactus’¦ why cactus? God’¦ God’¦ somewhere’¦ away off’¦ cactus flowers, star-yellow ray out of spiked green, and empties of sky roll you over and over like a mother her baby in long grass. And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees, pricking multiple leaves at his amazing story.
