(C) 1998
It is Summer and the lilac bush is already brown,
its heady purple gone until Spring.
Beauty lasts but a season
unless I have not learned to recognize it
unless it is rabid, bursting, young.
I would say that the tulip opening
is lovelier than the tulip decay,
that the red cherry outranks the yellow,
the apple above the leaf.
All my life a pursuit of beauty—
beauty limited
to a moment of ripeness.
Humans are born with an innate ability
to separate immediate beauty
in their symmetrical face
from the disproportioned average.
Still, I hear there are humans who develop beyond
baby-teeth, beyond narcissism and bed-wetting,
beyond shallow skin-deep love.
I have observed the homely, the helpless, hapless
holding hands,
leaning inward, in synchronicity,
mesmerized beyond the science of it all.
I want that, too.
