A Final Rose



At the place neither inside nor outside,

in a silence prior to thinking, the final rose

burns its black hole through your retina

into a turquoise gland at the back of your skull.

The scent drifts through umber petals

the way the soul exits a crinkled body,

except that the soul is only a description of itself,

but the odor of withered rose is real,

un-predicated on speech. We say,

"In the beginning," but this place is before

the beginning. We say, "was the Word,"

assuming that it is a noun. What if,

in the beginning, was the Verb,

un-declined, neither 1st, 2nd, nor 3rd person,

who created this world of nouns, or did She?

Perhaps there is no noun, it's all thing-less,

and the world is only our description of it.

What if the world is a terrible sweet fire

that finally consumes every human tongue?

Something about your gravity, your grief,

gives courage to the gods, who are tired

of being disembodied stains in a cathedral window,

fixed virtues in a catechism of glass.

They long to clothe themselves in flowing verbs

than rain on hay grass and release its sweetness.

They want to weigh upon this mother of bodies,

earthing themselves, hugging the brown of chestnuts,

bouncing like hail on an empty park bench,

dissolving like lonely faces of frost in maple leaves.

O yes, angels yearn to fathom the opacity

of your tears, smother their glistening in your dust -

which is, after all, how You came to this place,

the place of the final rose, where names of things,

and things themselves, must perish.


 

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