Poem Sequence: Apparitions

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. — Ezra Pound

***

In a Station of the Metro
by Dan Beachy-Quick
Peace fell on the dim lands a sort of abstraction
The metronome counted one petal after another
So the petals fell as or in some music
This song needs no breath just an apparition
With a mouth open and eyes and eyes
The wet smear of eyes beneath pink
Petals in excess of the window frame’s bright
Yellow square and yes spring gathers right now
The moisture from my breath up into clouds
Whose downpour makes of the plum tree in blossom
A diminishing crowd for which the natural symbol
Refuses to exist a plain blue gem on a pin
Faces glowing within the stone like flowers
Within the stone like flaws the mind turns inward
Turns inward its tangle of wet black boughs
A knot pulled tight so tight it ceases to be

A knot yes I’ll say it a knot that becomes angelic
Another example everywhere seen of the angelic
Gears toothless and without cogs a sort of mist
That turns the other gear by drifting through it
As just now through my eye drifts that storm
Battered tree whose broken-petal pocked bark
Asks of me a question my mouth can’t speak
Like a river that dives underground just there
There where the animals thirst the most
A desert fox say or say a toad or let’s speak more simply
About a plum which bursts through its own explosion
Into being and hangs there so ponderously
As if as if not concerned with innocence or
Gravity or other acute angles as they evaporate
Into this poem O no am I speaking again again about
dim lands these dim dim lands of of peace

*** 

In Paradise Lost, Book VIII, Adam asks:

“Love not the heavenly Spirits, and how their love
Express they, by looks only, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?”

And the angel Raphael replies:

the Angel with a smile that glowed
Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue,
Answered. “Let it suffice thee that thou know’st
Us happy, and without love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, union of pure with pure
Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need
As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.”

***

1144
Ourselves we do inter with sweet derision.
The channel of the dust who once achieves
Invalidates the balm of that religion
That doubts as fervently as it believes.
--Emily Dickinson