The Tree With All The Body's Roses

The Tree With All The Body's Roses

"She sang beyond the genius of the sea. 

The water never formed to mind or voice,   

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves..."

Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West 

The world has parrots.

I'm looking for a songbird

in the jade well of deep forest,

a voice to bucket it up.

Behind the plastic house 

I found blue wildflowers,

watched their petals transmogrify

to wings on seeds 

 blowing like the freckles of stardust

mottling the Milky Way,
to daisy-face another autumn day  

in indigo beyond the swirling suns.

All this because a thousand years ago

in banished nights the apprentice read to me

words of a Northern heart washed up

 on a bleach and dazzle of tropic sand;

to me, his caryatid, words for a girl

 he loved I'd never be, that 
magic could not make me,

to sing beyond the genius of the sea.

Yet she brought me here, that girl,
a statue suddenly animate,

to dig and weed the heart's ground
beyond the ocean drench of chemical hope,

past youth itself in its naked greed, til at last a tree

would raise the mind's branch on which

a bird could land and sing

of all the body's roses we

never see.

~October 2017

 for October's Heart-Bits with Magaly 2017:

"The topic is simple: Love Is Love Is Love… and Words. Let’s art our loves with words in them. You can share a story or poem about why you love writing poetry, or telling tales, or singing, or painting, or dancing, or sculpting, or knitting, or bedazzling the skulls of your enemies and friends… write about the art you are happiest to create.
Your posts must contain at least one magical element and some sort of love(dark love, sweet love, ridiculous love, terrifying love, insane love, gentle love…)..."

(I hope the  young love and transmogrifying magic here is enough, even if it didn't exactly work as planned by the magician's apprentice. )

Rosa 'Pat Austen' ©joyannjones 2013
Clouds in Finland, by Konrad Kryzyzanowski  Fair Use