Too Beautiful

I never left the six acres last weekend, but to be honest, I never left the house for three days.
I was hoping to get a grip, but after the weekend I still didn't have lesson plans, my office was still awry to put it mildly, and I didn't have much fun. This weekend I started the day right, with a phone call, and another phone call, and then I wrote a poem.



Unpunctuated
for WS Merwin

So beautiful today
I don’t know what to do with it
I can’t be outside it’s too perfect
the morning glories are too too without
even ingesting their known iota of trip
The Maximillian sunflowers are poised
to bloom and even that potential is wildly
enticing into too beautiful The dues we paid
After the fires after the wind and smoke the terrible
canyon fires of Santa Clara watershed tears shed
I could cry again today for the world we earned
paid its dues to too beautiful too beautiful
beautiful datura beautiful the Jewish New Year
I am already lamenting I stand naked for an hour
in my greenhouse watching the cereus flower
prepare for night blooming I stand naked before
my shower and after my shower another phone call
from the too beautiful I talk naked on the phone
because I don’t know how to manage today
with how I love too beautiful the note in the mail
from you how I love poets and painters who make
the world shine me I never want to set foot
inside a classroom with no windows
I want to speak poetry to those finches
and to the kale I will tell the kale I forgive the aphids
you are so greenly beautiful I love my body today
because it is the vessel that carries too beautiful
soon departing for other beauty don’t mention
it you say but in the too beautiful death
is already sharpening the scythe its harvest
of the too beautiful a basil scent a mint too many
tomatoes and a glut of cucumbers and I forget
that I know how to preserve I am doing it now

9.17.11