Feast of the Ascension, 2004. Planting Hibiscus

From being to being an idea, nothing comes through that intact.
Look at the garden: dew-swooned and with fat blooms swollen,
With shade leaf-laced beneath the lemon trees —

It is hard to believe beauty is the new ugliness.
But it must be, why else would so many of my contemporaries mock it so?

                                              I guess it is true what they say —
That once a man falls he never again puts faith in the ground
On which he walks.

Putting faith in the ground — , is that what I am doing?
Is that what these blooms have been trying to tell me?
Is that what all their swooning
Has been about?

                       The shade grows long. The shade grows long
Upon the lawns and the fat green leaves of these lemon trees
Are still in the early evening.

                                  I could be buried here. That is,
I am — , I am buried.
Here.

Jay Hopler
Green Squall
Yale Series of Younger Poets
Yale University Press

Copyright © 2006 by Jay Hopler.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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