July 2024
Bio Note: This poem appeared in Azure, a Journal of Literary Thought earlier this year in a different version. My more recent work has been included in Modern Literature, Ekphrastic Review, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. As for my personal life, I am busy on my next full-length collection to be released in 2025, maintaining heart and home, renewing my passport thinking I will be going somewhere exotic, and feeding the local marmots.
Bloom
—The heart of man is very much like the sea . . . —van Gogh Being advances itself for being. . . . all I want is having you and music, music, music— That, O vast Rondure, is theme, and all else, they are convincing asides, movements in the symphonies of the sea; * fluorophores and organelles clutching themselves in a florilegium of emerald algal bloom dancing the sea’s harmonies, conjure bioluminescence and the night— . . . similitude interlocks all— * The sea has its moods too, somnambulist swells and their scends bumping into themselves, knotted gray browlines and twisted waistbands of waves and always erratic, the undersea violence, volcanic eruption, and when done and calm is calm again, soft surf and spray parliament of congenial libretti bright as children at happy-day-play, Orphic idylls swaying, and seacoasts, foam-soaked, sprout towers of echium, flower fantasies of blue girandoles, and pink girandoles in florid abundance, the pulses of salt and song singing over themselves and the sea winds blow rich mists to the inhaling inlands, fields of iris, sky lupine, sticky monkey, red sorrel . . . * Sea air wanted this to be written, all of it again and again, like the tide pulling out and the tide pulling in— . . . all I want is having you and music, music, music— Echo, the echoes sound and resound as much as spray is script, and that we do not need sea glass to see ourselves— Look—the lovers are once again vagrants walking the long sand hand-in-hand.
©2024 Michael Gessner
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