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[poemmedicine]

After Rain

P.K. Page

The snails have made a garden of green lace: broderie anglaise from the cabbages, chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils- I see already that I lift the blind upon a woman's wardrobe of the mind. Such female whimsy floats about me like a kind of tulle, a flimsy mesh, while feet in gumboots pace the rectangles- garden abstracted, geometry awash- an unknown theorem argued in green ink, dropped in the bath. Euclid in glorious chlorophyll, half drunk. I none too sober slipping in the mud where rigged with guys of rain the clothes-reel gauche as the rangy skeleton of some gaunt delicate spidery mute is pitched as if listening; while hung from one thin rib a silver web- its infant, skeletal, diminutive, now sagged with sequins, pulled ellipsoid, glistening. I suffer shame in all these images. The garden is primeval, Giovanni in soggy denim squelches by my hub, over his ruin shakes a doleful head. But he so beautiful and diademed, his long Italian hands so wrung with rain I find his ache exists beyond my rim and almost weep to see a broken man made subject to my whim. O choir him, birds, and let him come to rest within this beauty as one rests in love, till pears upon the bough encrusted with small snails as pale as pearls hang golden in a heart that know tears are a part of love. And choir me too to keep my heart a size larger than seeing, unseduced by each bright glimpse of beauty striking like a bell, so that the whole may toll, its meaning shine clear of the myriad images that still- do what I will-encumber its pure line.

[gigiglorious]

Summer is a time for poetry, in the lazy hours of the afternoon while the bees drone on and birds chatter. . . #bookphotography #bookstagram #instabook #currentlyreading #amreading #poetry #pkpage

[wasan-dialogues]

Art and survival

A poem by P.K. Page, contributed by Ben Wolfe

Address at Simon Fraser (excerpt) by P.K. Page

If we’ll but give it time, a work of art ‘can rap and knock and enter in our souls’ and re-align us — all our molecules — to make us whole again. A work of art, could, ‘had we but world enough and time,’ portray for us — all Paradise apart — ‘the face (we) had/before the world was made,’ or, to compound the image, vivify Plato’s invisible reality.

But is there time enough? This turning world we call our home, or notre pays — could become inimical to humankind — humanunkind as cummings might have said — in fewer years than I have walked this earth.

So, what is there to tell you? Only this. ‘Imagination is the star in man.’ Read woman, if you wish. And though we are trapped in the body of an animal, we’re half angelic, and our angel ear, which hears the music of the spheres, can hear the planet’s message, dark, admonishing, as the archaic torso of Apollo admonished Rilke, ‘You must change your life.’

Art and the planet tell us. Change your life.