Fugue for One Voice

There are some people who believe that fish 
Drown in the air; our element is so thin 
It can't sustain the flourish of those gills. 
This atmosphere, which is our medicine, 
By its own delicacy kills. 
You placed an orchid in a little dish 
Of water. The pale orifice, 
Prisoned in water, turned its petals out 
As though desiring a kiss, 
Or maybe in a comical grimace 
Like the last gasping of a landed trout, 
Absolute awe circled upon its face.

It was in this room we both jointly drowned.

With our immersion sea-flowers came to bloom; 
Borrowed by our imagination from 
The tapestries of France, they filled the room 
As they had once captured and filled the eye 
With brilliant inflorescence of antique design 
And climbed in whorls upon the crimson sky, 
As though it were of brick, and they a vine. 
And through their turning stems I saw 
The hand-stitched image of a lady where she sat 
Attended by small birds that made their caw, 
And on her covered wrist, 
Rendered in threads of umber and of blue, 
A hooded falcon sat at rest.

There came before her in a curious hat 
A gentleman of broad and burly stride 
Who, with his thumb and index finger, held to view 
The red meat of his heart 
Which he had plucked out of his side, 
And this was called, "The Offering Of The Heart."

This was not lavish if you bear in mind 
Whole dynasties of fish, swimming before mankind, 
Felt in the pressure of their element 
What Leonardo charted in a brook: 
How nature first declared for the baroque 
In her design of water-currents. Look, 
Then, what our own weather can invent. 
This was our coldest winter. It was no joke 
That set those unbelievable tormented freaks 
Howling and laughing on the finial point 
Of churches. Wind opened their shrieks, 
And snow worked out their eyeballs and their nails, 
And drove, with missionary fury, to anoint 
Abandoned cars with whiteness, 
Until they mainly looked like stranded whales, 
Whiter than legend, rotting in our streets. 
Rioting air conspired to engrave 
Outlandish thistles on the window-pane, 
Rose without thorn, and prisoned all in ice, 
Not more fantastic than the elaborate bloom 
Of underwater plants.

                They are the rich device 
And emblem of our nature. See the wind behave 
Like water. To drown is to remain 
Entirely alive; it is to breathe. 
Therefore believe the couple in your room 
Nothing but natural.

Now it is Spring, and the unclouded skies 
Flatter the grass with sunlight. Thick indifferent blood
Rises again in the vast hearts of trees. 
Upstream the fish are ripening for flies, 
And flowers, that were buried underseas, 
Being denied a refuge in the Ark 
Against God's first, uncompromising Flood, 
Blossom, by rite of magic, in the park.