after Philips de Marlier

That one little Prussian to mid-blue peep. Single cornflower
among the whole cornucopia. Lapis rosette wrenching on me,

my lyric wound: just what he did to me, just what I let happen
but can a boy really be said to ‘let anything happen’? Un-

answerable question at the taproot. So much crisp hurt in these
blue petals. And always the bloom’s corolla as a schoolboy’s face.

My face straining to understand how all this lives on in me
the way this solitary cornflower, hurt-sickle, lives on and on.

A curious kind of life being trapped under varnish, craquelure
forking above like a cyan-blue synapse buttonholing itself

into language. Like the bending of the boy’s anther-like mind,
filament body, now entirely inseparable from flower. Blazer-blue

bud unfurling. O give him a little peace – wreath strung with
hyacinth, narcissi, that cornflower – he was, after all, ‘a boy’.

*
From Magma 89, Grassroots 

 

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