Beauty

 (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 simply 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 and beauty limited
to a moment of ripeness.
 
Humans are born with an innate ability to separate
the immediate beauty  by 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, and yes,
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.