In a Maiden Season

(Lyrical impressions and flowery meditations
on some picked theme of her and me)
                                     *
When that April with his showers sweet
The draft of March hath pierced to the root
                                     *
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

I

Before summer comes, and that June sun whose rays both bathe the days
And may dazzle and daze us- nay, by May’s end at the latest- these last strays
Of those flowers that awed our hours and days, survivors of cold
Too soon flawed, frayed with age, wind-whipped, flayed by waves
That shall shake and broom all blooms and blossoms away, I look to save:
And so go out and view some fragrant, vagrant few and choose
All those whose faces will from vases best grace some room.

II

Not for many days will those most radiant among the remaining be displayed-
Such last blushing duchesses as seem in a rush to elude my least brush or touch-
Forsaken ones, once seen, chosen by me and taken from places for sake of saving
(Making some house seem a bosom-home); only pray don’t say saving my sprays
Savors of a rakish fake-savior raiding or raping Nature, for far better those I own
Bow down, slowly and lowly, as from their shoulders they should and so show
How far lovelier they are gathered from some yard, park or garden- together
Set apart (as if each lass with the rest resting, lassoed in string or else set
In glass rings)- with stems so many necks set one next to the other
In vessels till their blooms all droop and they drop their petals
(Let sap evaporate as water that what are flowers now is as grass in an hour
That I may gather her festal petals and set them, first and last, together)…

III

Are far lovelier for being so chosen, each one unique among dozens,
Blue bloom or red gathered rather than spread, disheveled, on the ground,
Spared instead of floating mostly unnoticed down; only to the poet’s notice
Formed into ladies’ robes and gowns too-soon-blown, not ice
Nor hoar but frozen as mounds of downy snow, or as ocean’s foam
Upon the shore- auras of wardrobes worn, mornings after the storm
(Or those close-fitting, borrowed clothes of loose shrews or whores disrobed),
Or as the last splash from the oar of our journey now or tomorrow rowed…

IV

By June all those last blooms swooped-down-on swoon, Death’s breath
Tearing them from their stems, all falling like tears wept; and before there descends
Late June’s humid heat that leaves all things, least and great- gray stone, green leaf,
Beast and flesh- wet with sweat, my May ladies as waste are west-wind-swept away…
All fair, kept fays, brides, damsels, maids are aged to dowagers- are debris to a rake-
No lone dame slow to be made fare or forage for Age, same as food for worms,
Or to form that loam soon to erode like some beauty on loan, seldom long seen
For being wedded to, and soon widowed from, both scene and season
(Each tree true for a season but treasonous as soon as another’s upon us).

V

I’ll hope not so those chosen ones, women whose passion and mission
Is to be beautiful after their fashion, to perfume or perform for me
Their pure feminine mysteries of odor and color, form and symmetry;
I’ll gather, not lure, all these together in alluring rings, all those in best dresses
Whose hues bring back blood and blush into too-bluish flesh, who seduce
With winks, rose-red grins, lips puckered, pink blushing skin; yet one maiden
Maybe set above the rest, some dame in red, admired and dreamed of
Like some other her once loved and coveted by me but now I’m rid of,
A self all-else now, a shell that shall hang on a wall or get set on some shelf.
She I scheme to see uncovered is sheeted as a specter, that selfish flesh
Not yet shed, or whatever form or essence sets her apart from me,
And I’m as separate as ever and desperate to merge with her spirit-
To gain a single vision of her where now divisions are, to get her together
Into one woman-specimen who is as many or more than an Arab’s harem.

VI

Don’t miss my meaning, thinking I these misses as mistresses imprison,
Or am one who’d throw an empress from her throne as a slut of no worth
To shut her up in a tower eons alone (as if in dungeons, not bowers, flowers grow),
As men do whose women are whores unworthy of amor; or am a mere collector
Of specimens- of just stem-set gems kept for when, after ages, images are fled,
Such pent-in pendant flowers that get hung like gems for some future recollection
(My specimens not those whose used-up, spent youth men once spent
To the tune of a fortune on- such investments, once fled, not returning
In vestments and dresses- mine kept not as what’s dead but as presences, pressed)…
Stiff or limp-limbed crones are not as those ones whose boughs, limber as boys-
Their soft-boned, oftenest of climbers- return for encores all clothed
In ribbons and bows, all aglow as girls first hit with arrows from Eros’s bow
Who hope to soothe those sores with scores of kisses, each sort- thorn-pricked
Or arrow-tipped- restored by a sorceress’s-mix of kisses (tulips) and roses.
So those flowers that died are dried and tied up in a bit of twine,
Pressed as dresses, habits or fabric kept in plastic, or folded in drawers,
Stored to stop or slow both moth and mold and the erosion of years.

VII

Though seen and seized by me (but with my every cut so very delicate)
No sisters (those sinister coquettes) as much as bled by my scissor’s blades,
And with infinite care I dedicate the newly dead to new lives of beauty-
My intimate snips as lips and kindest kisses to winter’s windier nippings-
And swear, freed from leaves (so we’re freed when no longer slaves of selves
Lingering amid vales of tears), each wears a beauty as fresh as the flesh
Of merriest May’s veriest, fairest maids (these unveiled, made-up madams
And dames arrayed in faded fashions- each of those a self false as all else
Not true to nature), made newly nude in the naked rays of their admirer’s gaze,
Each flower placed by me like a face I’ll trace all free of fakeness or disguise:
Now to claim my mistress’s eyes mirror the sun is not to rob her orbs of glory,
Rather the worry is his by hers will be eclipsed wholly and all earth be sorry.

VIII

Not in holy, lowly ladies dies that costliest blossom of all, nor is one lost to that lust
That tugs gust-like until a fall- disgusting us with even the loveliest and most beautiful-
Since no swarms nor worms that harm whole harems to that guarded garden dare come,
None to turn Eden-garments to hags’ weeds and rags full of holes and in need of darning
(Often as the damning, hissing/singing serpent in kissing stings, sinners to representatives
Of a stern-but-kindly King- Peter-sent peers, saintly natives- re-re-step to repent).
Here none but butterflies and some sorts of better bees- humble honey and bumble-
And hummingbirds, come; here no insects infest nor pests nest, no grubs, slugs, bugs,
Evil bees- lustful as whores or drones, ones eager for the queen hornet on her throne-
No beetles or borers rush as to an open bud (as sluts in lust to a bed petal-spread
And wet with wicked dew for two who are unwed- two who two words
Run from as some run towards love); here is no lover of lower selves
For who flowers live to be deflowered- nothing else: but now each in me
Is mine not when owned by me but crowned with its own virgin dignity.

IX

A moment for what dawns on me now: women there are- dears who fawn,
To be clear (wince- but like an odd, fun, pun-loving faun, I won’t object, not even once)-
Who wave hands as if wands, advertising their wanton charms, wares and wants…
I’ve seen them standing as with fans in hands, their arched, stretched arms like swans’
Wandering necks, gesturing to swains (who saw sin as pleasure, not death)
From the nexus of their depths and shallowness- views such as can then enchant
Some handsome and wretched men to take a chance and make wives of them;
No wonder then when one’s at once won over- a romance at a glance- for even harms
As harsh as March’s lion-last blasts are made warm by their chameleon charms
(Each may be made a madman, chancing a kingdom for a madam, for Siren’s chants
Are sir’s entrapments- strains changing to chains- and every ear’s eager for enchanting).
No sooner do two with bands and bonds tie-the-knot than poor husbands hear
That now not only one, but often each of ten fingers, and then wrist and ear,
Neck, toes, nose and who knows what next, I fear, demands diamonds to wear…
Be wise, therefore, and beware burdens to bear if, in lieu of purity and truth,
You pursue beauty, body and youth, those feminine nine liars in lieu of Ruths,
Ruthless Medusa-muses who seduce, with Beatrice-beauty or Laura-auras, to stony ruin,
And I blush to allude to all those belles as alluring-but-lewd as a Delilah or Jezebel).

X

Arrived, arrayed for the season, each bud but a belle making her ball debut,
All proud in crowns and gowns, arrayed in rays but for only days or hours now,
As no noon glowing at that moment shows how soon sad shadows shall be growing;
For before long all are shrunken to skin and bones, all those porcelain-skin dolls
Sinking-until-sunken into poor slain idols, and ones once as lovely as any two
Together grow lonely; early the yearly pagan pageants and parades of May
Conclude to my dismay, festive festoons and banquet-bouquets lay spread out
Like an heiress’s dresses shed (she having fled when her day’s disguises
Gave way to nakedness, and the warmer weather threatened her complexion,
With the wear and tear of summer weather ever the dread of her head and hair-
Tresses I best address them in verse, a lock of which a hero will die for).
Here I say her, yet every heiress is quite alike so I may address her as their:
Their– as in it and her, as by I I may mean either I or the other, or rather both,
As those who have selves so full as to halve- and lose altogether- know…
But I, a poet, not a philosopher, fear less a loss of meanings than a loss of her,
My immortal muse who’s all-through by June, crown thrown down, her throne
Not hers for more than a moment, her diadem not eternal like a diamond…
Alas, each May’s reign made by April’s rains is quickly over, all that month’s flowers
Becoming as shut mouths or doors obscuring their odors, all those that showed
With sun and showers hours afterwards shed and then bowed to the ground.
None but ones we save (as days) from decades of decay, placing them in memories
Or a vase, rise, are spared from oblivion, living on as vestiges of days and ages now done;
All the ones I was once excited to see have exited, and some, even those I miss most,
Seem no more now than mists and ghosts, is existing as if, or only in my myths and visions.

XI

Yearly I yearn for their return, but some come out too early as at some summons
(Mine?), with still a hint of winter splintering the air, and those fair-haired heiresses
Are by frost made bare, the time being near but not yet here for they either
Their early dresses or tresses, except warily, to wear; always by the time I find
I’m perspiring under summer’s burning sun all peacock plumes and spectrum-
Spumes, those beauties by rains and rays made so many rainbows on boughs,
Have showered the ground, both bonnets and bouquets, and all those thousand
And one accessories of my fairest, floral-enfolded, dolled-up, faithless ladies…
All my vain, in-vain ladies who, with stems and stays, were held up at the waist
Have fainted, are as scrolls unrolled, all those pains over painted faces wasted
(Was it waste if we saw?), for the rituals of palette and toilette are fated to fade
As fast as past days, as feasts into fasts, as phases and faces morphing from forms firm
Into auras; or as in east-west progression, then when the shape to the shade lengthens,
Changes and fades: unless if with all-viewing-awe we saw what was and so shall recall;
The fact, happy as sad, is that on April’s stage this ageless and smost visual of all rituals
Is reenacted, the lost actresses reappear in their dresses and I’m held captive.

XII

The last vestal vestments, true testaments to Nature’s beauty, are ruthlessly pruned,
And no hand of man, or ever so many men’s pious amens, can mend them-
Spring’s flowery lease being for briefest of seasons then ended, garments are rent
At one month’s end and not the least reprieve is given for the grieved lad’s pleas
Or pleased lord’s petitions, nor for any reason under the Sun (except its ceasing-
Be that end sudden or a slow lowering beneath the horizon never to rise again).
Before June’s ended much is plucked and shrunken, as the plump plum to a prune
(Say a ballerina-pretty prima donna to a prim prude or an anonymous nun-
Each a fat lady whose fall from a bough signals the end of a season of song),
The grape to a raisin, the juice is drunk, the fragrances faded, and on the faces
Of false Nature a true tree-green (seen in a bluer hue in scenes more remote,
As with memory, mood or mountains) has since descended- immense curtains
To screen scenes and scents; the season spent, soon we see what seems to us
A mere dream, after so long wrapped in seamless fabrics men’s fragile senses
Warping and they then imagine, in nostalgia and passion, they fathom by magic
The back of some pattern, view the warp and woof of all Beauty and Truth:
The essence of Woman, the fragrant fractals of a flower, the union of the two.

XIII

Rapt in illusions, stuck under the influence of some high-noon sun, while thinking it
The summit of true Beauty, some men are stunned to discover- to remember, truly-
Come July and summer the color is gone (all but a few faintest, faded paints, hints, hues
And tints we glimpse of strays whose always-say-stay instincts insist on a longer stint),
The dancing and masquerading is done, and in lieu of brand- and candelabra-lit branches
Vastest canvases of green seem to us just dust covers for another shut-up season:
Each tree an abandoned mansion and each fan-in-hand, abandoned woman a phantom,
All my ladies dead by maladies of age and strain (by which every living thing dies),
Maids I admired in red, pink and white are blighted and bled, all dead by green-eyed envy…
Each Midas-rich, in-prism-print-dress princess who I wooed, no sooner than even
On the brink of our union, swoons, and, like ladies in fables, sheds her dress for a prison;
Women who wooed, wowed and won me once, who would wound me round their fingers
Like any band, now grin- in half-rings- as they wound and haunt me constantly; and, wand-
Changed (but not so my wants), are hidden under hoods, wonder-stripped, seeming to me
For the rest of three seasons barely more than mere trees in woods green or forests bare.
(I’ll go so far as to agree a green genre is lovely too, but to speak by way of comparison:
To me each mere leaf is as a Grendel, gremlin, griffin, Gorgon, Gollum, goblin or green-gore ogre,
Gruesome-grin gargoyles who sit where once grew some long-gone-now damsel in silks or satin,
For each that in flowering awed me to my lips is simply flawed if it greets me in merely green).

XIV

Over all beauties and blooms crafted on Nature’s enchanted looms
Looms the unpalatable truth (but most usual fact) that this fascination
With what’s beautiful passes, as every fad and fashion, be it gradual
Or fast, is fated to pass as the grass (no sooner grown than mown
And blown away at last), as every flower fate or favor sagely saves
For a vase or corsage ages and fades, for we but delay days into decades
Processions of decay and the grave; though it fastens on us to possession
We’ll do well to recall all past infatuations and so know the true future,
That all that is with us will wilt and wither, whether tomorrow or after,
That all must sooner or later alter, falter and fall (so goes Creation’s course
In fulfilling our first fault’s fell curse, finally ours not at Eden’s garden source
But is in the end since we sin in willing worst- erring in preferring illness to cures;
Not then in Gethsemane Garden when God sweat and bled, yet on the killing hill
We all assisted with our every sin ever since, each one a thorn, splinter or nail
By which He was slain on a throne, overthrowing Hell: may we with Angelic army,
Saints and all without stain, praise the Only Almighty Maker, He Who made Mary
Even Heaven’s Dame, Lady we crown now-and-forever May’s only true Maiden,
Lady most made in blessed, ageless Image of Him Who Is Being before beginning).

XV

Every blushing bloom now in full blood is swiftly bruised and wounded,
Petal by separate petal is blood-let to moon-pale death with no platelets
Or sutures to stem the red flood (a connoisseur of all things beautiful,
How often I’ve thought to sever-to-preserve some blossom for a boutonniere
Suitable for a lapel, rescuing several, or a torn few for what men label an ornament
Or a souvenir); for each floral-origami face, thousand-faceted and original,
Is worth saving to savor against the days and years when the fountains
Spout out air rather than water clean and clear; when the springs no longer flow,
Being choked at their throats- no, down lower now, for the aquifers and reservoirs
Are well below rope and pail; when every flowery bough is dead in a record drought
So absolute I’d doubt, had I not now as an inkling these shreds of shrouds,
It ever rained a single drop, or I ever saw a sprig of spring, for all that sprinkling
By breeze of Maytime sprays is henceforth froth and dross at the feet of trees and me.

XVI

Such is proof enough the beauty I saw was not such stuff as dreams are made of
Made to go poof the moment my eyes were opened; proof no Proserpine-rose I loved
As though struck by Eros’s arrow was an error of thought; or, worse, for all I know,
A recurring blessing/curse some Prospero bestows on those few who drink poetry
Deeply into their souls: a most potent potion any modest portion of which, a drop
Or a drip, risks clotting, clogging, closing reality’s flowing (as reason knows it)…
So slowing observation even to a stop I seize on and make odd a random moment,
And clothe, not clone, the most prosaic thing or occasion some are in the human habit
Of softening, cloaking by looking at-but-past so often, as seasons changing, in a mosaic
Of habits and fabrics; spring surprises us (used to muteness) with new music, inspiring
Habit-hibernating minds with hints- winds that, for us, will be wings of Zephyrus
(Never Icarus), as surprising as spring’s rising-and-riding-in from winter’s hinterlands
And how buoyant and joyous as a boy I am then; now, yet long a man, it’s as if
The thought of summer ought never come, and though seasons will come and go,
For some (for me?) a hundred times if once, and a thousand thousand and one
Over and above those ones I’ve yet met or ever can in time and mind, my heart,
No intimate of Earth, whatever omens and tokens it’s shown, won’t know it…

XVII

Though all flowering is, at that moment, as moving to me as many Muses,
Owing to the losing of it too soon by its floating and flowing forth on wing
Swiftly as finch’s singing my mind can’t compose it, and so must most moments
Be lost, blended and end up as so much compost; so a boy’s joyous, blinded mind
Knows nor obeys not the notions of ocean’s Tide or Time but moments, seizes on neither
Seas nor Seasons, and with eyes thus shut sees, sings or sighs of things and sights, not Signs.
Who knows but the surest cure for this bliss ending in sadness, this ever-new witnessing
Of Venuses even now leaving leafy avenues for far-off seasons as for foreign venues
(After a spring-fling fleeing for longest rest into forests green, hills colored red, rust,
Orange or gold, or cold meadows sown brown and yellow, soon blown white with snow),
Is in making these muses as misses I’m used to, useless to seduce or move me to love
And whose kisses none are jealous of (ceasing to love I cease to be moved).
I’ll not miss being bewitched, having been cured of caring, having once made
Habit out of magic, a tragic alchemist mixing passion with passing sadness…

XVIII

Still, I fear I’ll be made ill, one who, in halving some complex mixture or elixir,
Makes the potion less potent, more poison- because of- in spite of- else both…
So the complex portioning-out and combinations, not contradictions,
Of these come-and-go emotions, scarcely knowable as I move in close,
All but impenetrable as I move still closer; for no motion approaches
Or achieves illumination, only standing at a distance and remembering
One instance of a bud or cup opening up that was for a month or more
Shut like a pouch, mouth or hut’s rusted door (but as at a touch or torch-lit aura
Out of the warm south at last restored, opening up its hermit’s house into thousands
Of pastel or palest petals as full as plates); or a butterfly from a cocoon, or a crescent into
A full moon and her aura too: soon a sudden flood of odors overcomes sluggish sense,
Wing-thin doors holding hints of incense within are unfolding swiftly lifting it into wind-
Flitting, floating, drifting- fluttering butterflies on a current that, come summer,
Fall, winter, we’ll recall well, and will recall all, half, or more than some of that vast sum
Of things past and grasp, at long last, what we thought was perhaps lost, having gone
In a flash the way of all flesh and grass; I’ll no longer be hoping my willing and groping
Will alone recapture the raptures of some moment now long far off or foreign in origin…
For in my flesh, sinking in deeper than skin, than any fleck or freckle, all fled petals
Are growing and grouping this very moment, refreshing sluggish blood and linking
With it Nature’s inks, hundreds of reds- millions even- and, oh, those pinks…
(Hopkins’s gold-vermillion I discovered once springing from some twig,
Such a color red never thought of, for none can, but known as soon as seen).

XIX

These reflections, at their core, are more glimpses and mere inklings than anything
Akin to deep thinking, impressions of a thousand empresses in dresses and gems,
Of beauty timeless as diamonds that chance and change blinds every time-bound,
Sign- and item-mired finite mind to, bringing in blinks and blanks; yet I sing thanks
To that same (as me?) change, that that all-but-all-altering alternating that for a time
Estranges us later but soon enough begins to bring back spring’s beauty and bounty
From some bleak-black brink, combining coming spring and rising desire as by Design.
(Sun-tied, eternally turning cycles of the four seasons align with our psyches even as tides
Are moon-moved or moored and tied to time, all past currents at last recurring; signs too
We find, and will solve if resolving to love those clues under our noses we’ve grown used to
And so too soon lose; still, the wheel revolving, we’ll see the ever-too-soon-swooning arising).
I write this right as summer commences and the green-robed scene I see before me bores me,
For half my senses (I’ll have the census-takers among us know I can halve the sum of them,
There being above five as I live and breathe) are suddenly sunken under some hundred suns
Of a burning summer, suffering from this hated-like-death heat that wearies the year and me.

XX

Soon high noon’s bloom must droop, the upon-its-summit Sun somewhat dropping-
Then some more- summer-sunken senses recover their bearings, Heart its beatings,
Come autumn’s warmer offerings; bleedings-out of red, orange, gold and umber,
Still all falling finally into full-on slumber, perhaps coldly collapsing once and for all
(For aught I can then tell, Soul being caught under some spell) under the smother
Of utter winter: senses stunned-until-sunned along with and among such buds
As flower at that augural hour- my aura restored, stirred by the first chirping of a bird,
Or a sudden flood or flutter of color (some six months’ run of shut shutters over and done
Upon the bursting forth of Earth’s first-fourth’s aurora, our common mourning
And coma over come morning); and each twig and branch a perch and a wand
Perfect for summoning up from slumber’s bonds- chirps and buds the yawns-
The Earth’s long- and early lost, the weary Heart’s years-long yearned for Dawn.

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