Other Gardens, Other Nights (Eclogue 5)

As to better see a moon

we defer, as bodies, to the earth

in subtle and soft folds among the stalks

of luminescent hyacinth, and near enough to

the stone of our fallen figures for the warmth

of their newly flowering flesh.

In the garden,

at night. It is a garden of bodies. Of our bodies.

Pluck the moon that bends

the hyacinth to your lips, lift

its perfume to your nose. Take in its

light—it will bring sleep.

The bats are restless in their whorls, and must be.

They mark our heads with the number.

The number of all numbers. The wilderness of numbers:

Infinity. Sleep.

I will count the passing hours in your ribs,

the days in the phases of your lunar breast

as the moon travels through your body

into the bed of your womb.

Infinite womb. The garden of gardens.

I will not fall

asleep. Your body illuminated

fends off the bats from descending into my eyes,

and the city behind us—its ghosts as restless—

will not in tenebrous shudder pulse a pulse to match the truly

beating heart's. You are to dream,

dream past the edges of all sound, through

the face of the dark and the face of the water

at the other end of the infinitely-expanding

mind of God. There, you are to receive

a message.

Your hands sink into the earth,

your spine, your ribs. The last of your lunar

breast a crescent when, from your navel, emerges

the tree, the first and the last:

the tree of trees.

Your eyes two moons in the ground,

over which flash opalescent the myths

of the beginning, which are the myths of the

end. This myth of all myths.

And your mouth, another moon in the center

of the garden, speaks in the syllables of light

from the other end of the universe:

There are other gardens,

other nights; there are other trees—

a second tree of blossoming limbs

heavy with neglected pomegranates,

in a garden, beasts of earth

and birds of sky and fish of the threatening sea

restless in condemnation to

infinity, yoked to its burden.

A third tree. They were careful to split

the fruit to spill no juice on their fingers,

the seeds for planting, the seeds for an orchard

of trees, the orchard for a forest beyond the garden

for an earth of trees that block out the sun;

fourths and fifths, each a first and a last.

In the infinitely-expanding

mind of God there are infinite trees.

You wake in the terror

of the muteness of a tree. On your limbs,

pendent moons, and your branches,

heavy with marmoreal ribs.

And you cannot speak until the music

of the ribs ring with the direction of the wind—

it will come from the city behind us,

the city, real because we cannot see it,

and it will deliver the ghosts to scatter

the seeds of your moons. Some will fall to the earth

of the garden, some will fall

into the orbit of the bats. Some will rise

past the horizontal twilight into the womb

of the sky. And I will not sleep

until you speak with this music

of your ribs: the song of

salamanders and philomels,

of blood and ambrosia,

of thunder and first words.

The song of songs.