counsel! Real privilege is
what we mean by art, where the satisfaction
you seek effortlessly bears
you up with the elegant
starkness of purple, green, gold. Each unadorned
leaf startles with intent, like
a woman's bright wrist and knee
parting her kimono as she leans forward
to hand me a new iris
of my own. Tearing apart
the petals I observe once more how painting
reduces truth. What we make
from nothing need only be
enough for recognition: the audacious
colors conceived on precious
metal, no eight-fold bridge, no
time, place, tears. These are already among your
luxurious possessions
which, in the old days, were quite
understood - and how I'd welcome a signal
from the lean past in these hot,
bedizened days, from what our
weak emperors have lost! Here, only here, is
the flower of that court, with
its pleasure and clarity
and with its sorrowing gentlemen poets,
a material world of
things left glowingly unsaid.
Jeffery Donaldson
NEARING THE GATE OF HORN
Orpheus, do I behave? appearing
behind you once (twice perhaps?) each month, one
of the occasional walk-ons hired
for that last closet-drama you put on
