All selections © 2000 The Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson,
from To Do as Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson, Talisman Press,
2000
BEAM 30, The Garden
for Patricia Anderson
"To do as Adam did"
through the twilight's fluoride glare Mercury in perihelion
(rotating exactly three times
while circling the sun twice)
to Pluto foot tilt up the slide at either plane
and build a Garden of the brain.
Internetted eternities, interspersed
with cypresses
ply ringed air about the many spectacled apples there.
Flamestitch niches orb in swivel orb, The Muses thrush at center
turning. Phospheros arborescens they sing
sense's
struck crystal clarities
to knock the knees
(or scarlet hollyhock, against a near blue sky).
No end of fountains lost among the shrubberies full eye may bare.
Fixed stars
with fireflies jam the lilac.
The Lord is a delicate hammerer.
Gold hive upon gray matter
He taps synapse ("carrying to") ("carrying away")
an immense bronze pinecone moon-knit at the end of a vista
of sunny jets d'eau, silver poplars. All
shivered in a pool.
Literally, a flowing: form-take-hand
-with-form
(That Which Fasteneth Us)
pillar to pillar the great dance arch itself through all that
is or was or will be, 3/4 time. This will be a glade
at the head of one stream
and a resonant gnomon before it will stretch regions of signaling
gnat-like resiliencies in the atmosphere
of where we are --
or were.
Or will be, when the mingled frame of mind
of man is celebration.
Gates, which separate the wings
of tiered ilex, open
in caverns of atoms passing from one into another's zenith
of periodic movement, vast helicoidal shift:
a vaulting of arteries
beating their heads against the dark.
This is the body of light.
Vertically in a chromatic spread chord
-- Elysian elision --
J'avaid bâti, dans un rêve, un palais, un château ou des
grottes
along the lines of sight.
Dear Garden:
This is the way the world begins, the word begins.
Through here,
where grow the galax and aster together,
I have planted Shadow illuminating The Field of Glittering
Opposites:
ange arc-en-ciel
flocons de neige
I have attempted a temple as if hierarchies of music
beating against time gone adagio, that is the Secret Pool we return
to. And not to stone
but to the world behind its human
mirror.
This is the way the word begins, the world begins,
wrestling the old ineffable to Bosch's amazing white giraffe
-- or St. Rousseau
intent a symmetry of whisker.
Love itself is a kind of mirage nesting it all
together. Around a center
no one can see the end of at the Well of The Bottomless,
I have placed parallels of bright guardians
"along with the trill
of the Nightingale,
and the call of the European quail"
as in The Pastoral.
(Signed) THE GARDENER
P.S.
"I have refracted it with Prismes, and reflected with it Bodies which
in Day- light were of other colours; I have intercepted it with the
coloured film of Air interceding two compressed plates of glass;
transmitted it through coloured Mediums, and through Mediums
irradiated with other sorts of Rays, and diversly terminated it; and
yet could never produce any new colour out of it. But the most sur-
prising, and wonderful composition was that
of Whiteness."