Getting up close won’t ever help you find
Whatever makes a rose what it just is
Nor can you catch its essence as it dwind-
les in the distance – nothing can exist
Larger or smaller than its proper size.

You and life cannot have a drink together,
You cannot lock antennas with an ant,
Graveyard and cradle cannot hug each other,
Nobody snows, no mountain wears a hat:
Everything out of context is a stunt.

Oh yes you might observe the rose forever
In some black hole a spaceship falls into,
Petals as petrified as jet fuel, never
Moving, but this is nothing like the true
Rose bees swarm in and nostrils go for scent to,

Is it? Perhaps an astronaut thinks so,
Deep in a crushed-in space, if that suspense
Allows for thought where everything is slowed
Down and the present, past and future tense
Combine like ice cubes in an empty glass.

A real rose trembles on the cusp of Now.
Its shape, its odour and its colour clamour
To grab sensations alien to a flower,
Part bee, part human through the spring and summer,
In winter withered to a jagged claw,

Yet none of this will ever make a rose
A rose forever or make now forever
A rose, a rose that never was, God knows,
But somehow all there is, the undiscovered
Truth about what it means to be alive.

.

Current edit:

22 June 2014

25 May 2015

29 August 2015