Post by MoonyLuna on Dec 22, 2008 12:39:18 GMT -5
Aren't They Beautiful?
Aren't they beautiful,
she said, with an edge,
because I hadn't commented
on these slender,
some would say splendid
purple things
we'd come upon. The foxglove,
she repeated, aren't they beautiful?
Foxglove, what a nice name,
I thought, I liked that name,
and told her so, but I was thinking
of conversation, the way beautiful
often puts an end to it.
And remembered as a child
those long drives in the country—
Look! a clearing. Look!
a swatch of wildflowers.
All the tedium of ahs and yeses,
all that piety before the perfect.
Beauty, for her, was a beginning,
an honest way in. I knew that,
yet still I wanted to say, Give me
what a troubled soul might see,
give me that kind of beautiful,
but heard the sanctimony in it,
told the truth instead, the truth
that also digs one's grave,
becomes its own epitaph.
Until you asked, I said,
I saw nothing, almost nothing.
Deprivation is the mother of beauty,
a wittier man might have declared,
pointing theatrically
to all this blinding abundance.
Or simply admitted he was a prisoner
of his prejudices, helplessly himself.
The foxglove were looking smug,
uncontestable. And there I was,
impatient, angling for an argument.
We were standing directly in front
of those tall, pendulous eye-catchers.
What do you see now? she asked,
you're staring right at them.
The lies of daylight, the failures of language,
God the vicious, hiding behind another veil.
History
It's like this, the king marries
a commoner, and the populace cheers.
She doesn't even know how to curtsy,
but he loves her manners in bed.
Why doesn't he do what his father did,
the king's mother wonders—
those peasant girls brought in
through that secret entrance, that's how
a kingdom works best. But marriage!
The king's mother won't come out
of her room, and a strange democracy
radiates throughout the land,
which causes widespread dreaming,
a general hopefulness. This is,
of course, how people get hurt,
how history gets its ziggy shape.
The king locks his wife in the tower
because she's begun to ride
her horse far into the woods.
How unqueenly to come back
to the castle like that,
so sweaty and flushed. The only answer,
his mother decides, is stricter rules—
no whispering in the corridors,
no gaiety in the fields.
The king announces his wife is very tired
and has decided to lie down,
and issues an edict that all things yours
are once again his.
This is the kind of law
history loves, that contains
its own demise. The villagers conspire
for years, waiting for the right time,
which never arrives. There's only
that one person, not exactly brave,
but too unhappy to be reasonable,
who crosses the moat, scales the walls.
Copyright
Stephen Dunn
Aren't they beautiful,
she said, with an edge,
because I hadn't commented
on these slender,
some would say splendid
purple things
we'd come upon. The foxglove,
she repeated, aren't they beautiful?
Foxglove, what a nice name,
I thought, I liked that name,
and told her so, but I was thinking
of conversation, the way beautiful
often puts an end to it.
And remembered as a child
those long drives in the country—
Look! a clearing. Look!
a swatch of wildflowers.
All the tedium of ahs and yeses,
all that piety before the perfect.
Beauty, for her, was a beginning,
an honest way in. I knew that,
yet still I wanted to say, Give me
what a troubled soul might see,
give me that kind of beautiful,
but heard the sanctimony in it,
told the truth instead, the truth
that also digs one's grave,
becomes its own epitaph.
Until you asked, I said,
I saw nothing, almost nothing.
Deprivation is the mother of beauty,
a wittier man might have declared,
pointing theatrically
to all this blinding abundance.
Or simply admitted he was a prisoner
of his prejudices, helplessly himself.
The foxglove were looking smug,
uncontestable. And there I was,
impatient, angling for an argument.
We were standing directly in front
of those tall, pendulous eye-catchers.
What do you see now? she asked,
you're staring right at them.
The lies of daylight, the failures of language,
God the vicious, hiding behind another veil.
History
It's like this, the king marries
a commoner, and the populace cheers.
She doesn't even know how to curtsy,
but he loves her manners in bed.
Why doesn't he do what his father did,
the king's mother wonders—
those peasant girls brought in
through that secret entrance, that's how
a kingdom works best. But marriage!
The king's mother won't come out
of her room, and a strange democracy
radiates throughout the land,
which causes widespread dreaming,
a general hopefulness. This is,
of course, how people get hurt,
how history gets its ziggy shape.
The king locks his wife in the tower
because she's begun to ride
her horse far into the woods.
How unqueenly to come back
to the castle like that,
so sweaty and flushed. The only answer,
his mother decides, is stricter rules—
no whispering in the corridors,
no gaiety in the fields.
The king announces his wife is very tired
and has decided to lie down,
and issues an edict that all things yours
are once again his.
This is the kind of law
history loves, that contains
its own demise. The villagers conspire
for years, waiting for the right time,
which never arrives. There's only
that one person, not exactly brave,
but too unhappy to be reasonable,
who crosses the moat, scales the walls.
Copyright
Stephen Dunn