And those who are beautiful, who can know them?
The child murmuring as she runs,
keep safe my joy.
Her flowering, then her fading, seem
forms of trespass,
Like the scattering of peony blossoms after a storm.
Their beauty, oddly, drags them to earth.
What then?
What then?
*
When you lift yourself up to the mouth
of another,
What is its proof-text? When Julian asked,
who shall tell me,
Who tech me that nedeth to wit
What need marked her? What desire?
What gave her to say
That God is like a circle whose center point
is everywhere,
Whose circumference is nowhere?
Her language, geometry. Oddly cool.
Her words, backlit and sure.
How do such words arrive
as signature within the body of another
Speaking God?
*
Her gesture holds. Do not turn from this.
In her mouth like honey.
Slowly she brakes her sentence.
A fragmentary of Whom she knows shivering
at dawn.
What then?
What then?
Peony petals—