All smolder and oxblood,
these flowerheads,
flames of August:
fierce bronze,
or murky rose,
petals concluded in gold—
And as if fire called its double down,
the paired goldfinches
come swerving quick
on the branching towers,
so the blooms
sway with the heft
of hungers
indistinguishable, now,
from the blossoms.
Tannic yellow, or rust,
a single brassy streak
at each mid-petal
colluding in a bull’s-eye ring,
copper circle
around the seed-horde
flashing like a solar flare.
You can’t finish looking:
they rear and wave
in pentecostal variety.
You might as well be tracing flames.
Maybe nothing gold
can stay separate—
not feather flower fire.
My work’s to say
what signals here,
but Lord I cannot
see a single thing.
If I were a sunflower I would be
the branching kind,
my many faces held out
in all directions, all attention,
awake to any golden
incident descending;
drinking in the world
with my myriads of heads,
I’d be my looking.
Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all, From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light, But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of
gold-color’d light…
Their rattling August clothes,
faces a swirl of hours,
coil in the seed
unwound at last to these
shag faces bent
over the ruining garden:
Warm evening,
vertical
and gold,
stalk of the body,
glistening hairs
radiating out from the curled
and lifted leaves
paired along the stalk, pattern
plunging toward the center
like the line of the thighs…
Paul said when the neighbor’s puppy
ran across the street, into traffic,
because it wanted to see our dogs,
it looked like “a little flame.”
Nothing gold can stand
apart from any other; the sunflowers are trafficked
by birds, open to bees and twilight,
implicated, alert: fire longs to meet itself
flaring, longing wants
a multiplicity of faces,
branching and branching out,
heads mouths eyes
wishing always to
double their own heat.
Which is why the void can make nothing lasting:
the fuse resides in the yellow candling up, signaling,
and the concomitant yellow hurrying down to meet it,
and nothing that is fixed
can call its double down from heaven;
the gold calls to the gold
in the arc and rub,
calls to itself in the other,
which is why
the corona’d seedhead flashes the finches down.