The Rose
The late sidelong light’s red-gold
on the walls, on the tall dry grass,
on the moon’s face low and immense
across the expanse, in the distant
sky trapped in that fire-lit shallow
creek, its mirrored streaks of cloud…
not many breaths of this, not many
heartbeats, and what will keep
in memory still less, so it seems,
so it is, that between pulses,
between blinks, perception’s presence
opens, as if it knows, and lets
in as through parted lips the instant’s
sweet and coppery tincture. Even
though it is brief as the moment before
getting back in the car for the droning
hours over the mountains, even
though it is years you might bear
your marrow under the stars, now
you’ve tasted the light of the flower,
the rose whose petals, you know,
you and all these things are.
[“The Rose” first appeared in The Midwest Quarterly.]