Believe and Believe

Harrisville’s square brick houses

sun themselves like Renoir nudes.

Summer’s fading. Cricket re-tune

in the graveyard beside the pond.

A pair of white-haired women

canoe-race each other,

paddling so hard the water hurts.

I lie in the grass, risking ticks,

and watch the sky do nothing

but indulge its favorite blue.

You with your pearly religion

would mentally pioneer that space

with balloon-shaped benevolence

sure to offend normal Christians.

You’d postulate nuclear spirit

ripened over the years to a fine

hard gloss. Back on my feet

before I sink into the lichen

I wander back to browse among

the mill buildings braced on slopes

rolling toward Monadnock. A brook

tumbles one step at a time

toward a lake where growling boats

drag skiers to their doom. You’d laugh

as they tumble in prismatic spray,

dunking in bottom-feeder depth.

Whatever I say in defense of space

eroded by ancestral glaciers

applies to your right to believe

and believe. The hard brick houses

track the light like sundials. We’d live

a little unhappily here,

the winters shaped like bell jars;          

but when loons set the pond ringing

your imaginary benevolence

would apply, and the warmth

of sun on brick would penetrate

with a gold opulence you’d lather

all over yourself till you shine.

Helleborine

A soundtrack of sultry engines

and gnashing blades. Loggers

are warping my neighbor’s woodlot

to bloody his eager bank account

with tire ruts through the wetlands

and slaughter of nesting songbirds.

But my perennial plots retort

with clustered stalks of orchis,

a gift from an unknown source

windblown about the cosmos.

Alien, epipactis helleborine

welcomes me into the garden

with a sudden flurry of blossoms.

Tough ribbed leaves clutching the stem.

Green-tint flowers shaded purple,

hearty lip thrust forward, a sac

with pointed tip underslung.

I hadn’t noticed the stalks growing,

although they must have required

days or weeks of nourishment

to rise from the bottom of things

and crown themselves in mottled shade.

As I kneel before their glory

a double-rigged truckload of rubble

hacked from the living white pine

lumbers along the road and sneers

its lonesome diesel sneer,

mocking with carbon emissions

the defeat of entire forests.

But I’ve come to these flowers

as one returned from a distant star

to linger for a final close-up.

The helleborine looks aloof

yet available, tough but frail

like a character in film noir.

Its aroma defies my sense of smell

with subtleties I can’t parse

from the larger photosynthesis.     

So never pick an orchid. Tiny

but finely sculpted blossoms

climb their stalks and peer at me

with that floral curiosity

that feels so much like a feeling

crawling right over me, groping

for some grave yet passionate reply.