Within Prospect's Figure

`So the Soul's motion does not end in bliss' - Katherine Philips

I
When it was still in season
to regard oneself as growing
not straight a dull cedars
guarded in the breeze, from singular frost
by a singular gardener who tends likewise
the shallow crocuses with remonstration -
almost as base as the tongue of frost
twixt four and five which grew them into pastels,
to forgive his sleep. Life is idolatrous. Or
ease him into forgetting.
More either, admirable what is not
that was a finer modulation to its essence.
The scene was a slowly collapsing festoonment as
a grey trunk to reveal night.

II
Whether from our own order, the furtive
abetting what is new amounts to the contortions of this life,
the crisp cut heads of autumnal radiance made slow.
In gasping outwards there is new growth.
You grown cold with the human wish, there can be, there must be
a returning as Phoebus intoxicated at night
and a fall that is not a redolent stump.
Which happens so we point skyward
sloven in outer retreats, the empty dance
of the native hermit's boyant nepenthe
his comic apperception of swell's fall
will drown again the self's entent.

III
Who was it that when the sense of closure,
knowed and returned its deeds, stalling on the threshold
bearing down his tender excoriations
to bring it apart again? The touch.