Impossible Garden

Nothing's true when the sea's wrong. Not my hands on the body.
Not the body in ashes spread thin and white and loose again.
The sea is dead wrong, the sea with ashes in its mouth thinks it's
a rose garden. Birds bird past the disobedient flowers, being
cardinal and red. Every thing birds away. Jaded sea, a billion years old,
I cannot see a garden in the surface. I look, as into a glass case—
just glass in those green eyes, quick and unfinished as thought.
Being slab of meat, being son of goggle-eyed fish, loose flesh
follows me: Spear. Sponge. Tide. Eyes disfigured in dead water—
water hands itself to empty sky. Water that was skin, assaulted
from the inside, climbing from bone. Taking the softness away.
In the parable of evaporation, the sleeper wakes from the meat world.
In this impossible version: a seagull: the whole sky circling.
Ashes ashes drifting into the sound: soft facts into a fictional sea.

Copyright © 2003 John Isles All rights reserved
from Elixir
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission