Clusters of a Single Species
I have begun reading the work of American poet Philip Levine. This little bit from "Winter Words" collected in A Walk with Tom Jefferson is delightful in its exactitude and its animation:
Birthday tulips, twelve hothouse flowersI wonder what he might have thought about the season for the brilliant incandescence of amaryllis ... we know what he does with paperwhites, the above lines continue:
of royal purple on long stilt-like legs
that sag beside the frosted window.
Paper white narcissus uncoiled from bulbsI like to think that the here is both in the poem and the referent to a place imagined.
that had only polished stones to push
their green shoots through. You can grow up here.
And so for day 1760
08.10.2011
