Status Updates From The Kingfisher (Knopf Poetr...

Easter Morning

a stone at dawn
cold water in the basin
these walls' rough plaster
imageless
after the hammering
of so much insistence
on the need for naming
after the travesties
that passed as faces,
grace: the unction
of sheer nonexistence
upwelling in this
hyacinthine freshet
of the unnamed
the faceless

Love is a climate
small things find safe
to grow in

from the shoulders up
she was pure Nefertiti, and out of that divine
brown throat came honey and cockleburs.
She had nine children and no identifiable husband.
She wore a headcloth like a tiara above a sack dress
improvised from a beach towel. She'd turned larceny
against the bureaucracy into an art form.

But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they're set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand unbelieving . .

. .the sun
underfoot is so dazzling . . .
there is so much light
in the cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.

Late in the day the fog
wrung itself out like a sponge
in glades of rain ...

then, in a lifting
of wisps and scarves, of smoke-rings
from about the islands, disclosing ...

the bandings of platinum
and magnesium suffusing,
minute by minute, with clandestine
rose and violet, with opaline
nuance of milkweed, a texture
not to be spoken of above a whisper ....

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame . . .
.
Gerard Manley Hopkins