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 flowers
of royal purple on long stilt-like legs
that sag beside the frosted window.

I 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:

Paper white narcissus uncoiled from bulbs
that had only polished stones to push
their green shoots through. You can grow up here.

I like to think that the here is both in the poem and the referent to a place imagined.

And so for day 1760
08.10.2011

Proximities

I have spent months brooding over some four lines of poetry. I initially thought that the rhyme paint/faint was too strong until I realized that it was the sound within a line (the relation of "wilt" and "faint") that was to my ear off — I would be happier in brining the "t" sounds closer together. And so here are the lines from Tulips by A.E. Stallings

These tulips make me want to paint:
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,

I would adjust the syntax: "And do not so much wilt as faint" but that leaves me without the sharpness of "do not wilt" and falling away of the assonant "so much as faint". I hesitate. It is like second guessing the artist with the brush. Like rearranging a bouquet.

And so for day 942
12.07.2009

Surprises

Edmund White concludes his memoir My Lives with a rich evocation of friendship whose final words are

Being predictable is one unforgivable sin in a friend.

And he has so nicely arranged the book so that strangers and friends can read the chapters in any sequence they desire and so participate in the pleasurable surprises that acquaintance with this volume brings.

And so for day 499
25.04.200