how sweetly flows that liquefaction
Michael Lavers
from The Burden of Humans in New Ohio Review
https://www.ohio.edu/nor/a/content/pdfs/lavers.pdf
The frost tattoos its sermon on the rose,Calls to mind poems by Lorna Crozier in The Garden Going On Without Us
but in a language only you can read;
ARTICHOKESIt is the implied notion of stitch in the frost tattoos that puts me in mind of the clothes in the poem of the vegetable which is gathered under the title "From The Sex Lives of Vegetables". And yet there is a distance between the lightheartedness of Crozier and the pathos of Lavers whose lines continue as the subject continues to regard what is read
Artichokes never
take off their clothes.
They want seduction,
melted butter, a touch
of wild garlic
The frost tattoos its sermon on the rose,And we are out of it licking the butter-soaked artichokes reading Herrick.
but in a language only you can read;
you have to know that all things pass and perish,
and that what you’ve said is finite, but continue—
as if grand exceptions might be made—
raking the leaves, stacking the wood, hoping
the child falls asleep against your chest,
hoping the blizzard swerves, knowing the wreckage
of the present will be gathered but
not soon, and not by you, because you’re in it,
there somewhere, under the sheet of snow.
And so for day 2101
13.09.2012
