Like rising from a nap
In the suffocating hour
Of a midsummer midafternoon.
On the pine nightstand,
A Chartres-blue vase,
Its dried flowers whispering:
“The water’s evaporated.”

At the uncurtained window,
A fly tapping, tapping, tapping,
The limitless green hills
Reflected in its thousand eyes.

                                           May 11. Dull; afternoon fine.                                                                                      Slaughter of the innocents.

                                         --Gerard Manley Hopkins

One resolved match-strike and it was done:
The long scrape,
                     The blooming spark,
                                       The whiff of sulfur,
The paper leaping from his fingertips.
Once in the candle, the poems curled like embryos
Then stretched as far as metaphor allowed.
Their ink-blood browned, bubbled in the heat then
The instress snapped,
The weave of alphabet unraveled.
Inscape plumed, gyred over his head.
Caught in the puff of his one, breathy cry,
The secular smoke lingered like a whore’s kiss, then
Whirled straight to the flared nares of God.

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