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."