bloomsbury: Green

Febrero 20, 2012

These coastal bogs, before they settle
down to the annual
business of being green, show an
ambivalence, an overtone

halfway autumnal, half membranous
sheen of birth: what is
that cresset shivering all by itself
above the moss, the fallen duff—

a rowan? What is that gathering blush
of russet the underbrush
admits to—shadblow, its foliage
come of ungreen age?

The woods are full of this, the red
of an anticipated
afterglow that's (as it were) begun
in gore, green that no more than

briefly intervenes. More brief
still is the whiff,
the rime, the dulcet powdering, just now,
of bloom that for a week or two

will turn the sullen boglands airy—
a look illusory
of orchards, but a reminder also
and no less of falling snow.

Petals fall, leaves hang on all
summer; chlorophyll,
growth, industry, are what they hang
on for. The relinquishing

of doing things, of being occupied
at all, comes hard:
the drifting, then the lying still.

Amy Clampitt

Posted by sarita at Febrero 20, 2012 7:10 PM