Blooms
Twelve yellowed lilies rising from the irises now departed
twelve forms the circle.
Five is a star: points weaving lightness of sound, the yellow brass together
as five flies circling, crushed one between my finger and palm.
Am I a good man,
a spot of dark blood on the skin?
Walking on pavement turned brick
thenbrickturnedpavement again,
listening to concentric robins, phantasmagoric crows with opened mouths
in the damp summer heat, shoveling coals in a furnace. Veinmelter
the ineluctable modality of song rushed water
through saturationless creek beds
diving up towards lightness once more.
Predusk, sun and moon two perfect spheres splitting milksky.
A robin sang above his tattered hair
balancing on the pulsated branches.
He sees lace curtains hanging
enclosed, a gothic window, a trellised steeple, a hollow skeleton
vicariating the bones of God, composing the heart of each man.
Personae stand as unconferable masks.
What did the hydraulis keyers know of this?
What did the first organ audio anatomists conceive of the mind?
Surely different from these bending playscapes of a child,
absurd and unordered.
The songbird sings a different song each day but never finishes singing.
Osawatomie! Tokyo! Kathmandu!
all holding spectrums, new men, new ideas
Who can see them all?
Hold the whole purview of the city’s construct,
invisible unflinching.
The path he walks is more of a tunnel,
more of an esplanade flanked by machines that could kill a man at any instant
Darwin never dreamed of this!
Pas du tout
Joyce never dreamed of Sartre,
dreamsky filled with annihilating stars,
all men, forcing their own imbecilic orbits through flotsam.
Benjamin Patterson is a high school junior from Lawrence, Kansas. He has received bronze and silver keys in the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards, and a poem of his was recently published in Ballast.
