Excavations

Garden

Long past midnight, in these enclosed walls
it's always been three in the morning. It's no time
for any person to be awake, to be kept awake
by any force of habit or circumstance or nature
- and no person is awake here, no one but I
in this forest of roses and sweet night blossoms.
The scent is narcotic, all white petals
and honey. It suggests dreams. There are poppies, too.
Somewhere in a tree, where blossom the beginnings
of ripe figs, or perhaps olives, a nightingale sings: tereu, tereu...
Sings so sweetly. I should be asleep, but sleep eludes me.
On such a night it is easy to think that I might
never sleep again, there will never be a night
such as this. How could anyone really sleep
on such a night, when the nightbird cries just so,
when the blossoms are so impossibly scented with fragility?

Examine the rose. I have touched its petals hundreds of times,
tonight. Velvet red petals, wine petals, unfolding slowly
in the night. I have stroked these roses so many times,
becoming one with their delicate majesty, understanding.
Insomnia, after all, brings clarity...I see the thorns,
blunt, but sharp as razors in the ideal, glaring, reminding.
Petals do not come without thorns. The red of the rose
is the flush of blood. It is the way of things.
Such sharp stars, relentlessly sane echoes of a silver city
once upon when, a pattern that wants madness but is really
only mad in its logic. Truth itself is mad. Oh, why
must everything be so clear! I would rather be deluded.
I would rather be blind, in a valley of the blind.

I can see the stars, the roses, the cold rocks upon which
the night is reflected, I can hear the sighs of the nightbirds
and of sleeping children who sleep the sleep of the innocent.
I can see how this will end. I can see the question, written
out in stars, the question which I once asked, which I long ago
forgot, but never really forgot; the question that you ask in your addresses,
gazing at me with your uncomprehending eyes. I can see it
in the folds of rose petals, in the discreet thatch of hedges,
the sway of leaves on the slightest breath of wind.
There is really only one answer. The only remaining question
is whether one will accept it with grace, or with rebellion.
The answer remains the same...You cannot hear it, unless perhaps
in the fitful dreams that come to you in sleep, but it is there,
as relentless as tide. As the soft, muffled sound of beating wings.
As the approach of dawn. Oh, why this cruelty? Grace is cruel.
The coming of dawn is no comfort.