Some beauty cannot help itself.
Like the brewing storm that shakes
the house with both hands,
the clumsy mammoth strength that Lennie had—
accident cracking the lintel.
Or the splendor of a girl’s face—
the one who sits in the heart of the boy you love:
so undeniable that it speeds your own pulse.
As when my mother walks
through the rose garden,
noon lighting behind each petal.
The softness of her body hardens in old age,
bones erupt from their stations like children
restless from a long drive.
Someone asks her to move
so the light may better fall on the flowers.
Later, she sees the pictures:
Cajun Moon, Maiden’s Blush, Princess of Wales.
Aren’t they beautiful, someone says.
And what can she say?
What can anyone do, trapped in the thinning
summer night, besides look hard at the veins
on every flower and admit:
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
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“Some beauty cannot help itself”—I love this.
ReplyDeleteThe way you use indentations and white space on the page are really spectacular and move the poem along in a way that would not happen if these spaces did not exist.
I thought it was kind of interesting how you included an allusion to ‘Of Mice and Men.’ I’m not really sure how it is supposed to work with the rest of the poem, though. If you could make this a bit clearer I think that may help. Right now I can only see it as a link to the shaking of the house and I suppose the threat of violence coming close? Am I near at all? Haha
I like the image of sitting on the heart of someone you love.
The image of the mother is intriguing—she changes from a soft figure to a harder figure, and the reader almost sees her fall apart in the poem and turn to dust. Someone asking her to move so they could see flowers, something that is superficially beautiful, really struck a chord and made me feel for her.
The figure of the mother is in direct opposition to the beautiful flowers in the garden—this seems to be following her deterioration into age. She seems bitter, admitting the flowers are beautiful, but upset that such emphasis is put on the superficial beauty of flowers and now that she is aging she is second fiddle.
I think someone needs to remind her that flowers, too, grow old and wither.