Daylilies At Night

Lilies which open half-sullen pods in the night

As if lightning bugs, the torso's involuntary

Lucent flash, and then the equally deep, abrupt

If transient absence: a pink or tangerine

Blush, then a full, fresh, unfurled nude

In a swirl of loosened complacency:

Beauty, per Coleridge; the cast of the dice

Which eliminates chance, pace Mallarmé.

And so the chaos of the body takes its fiction,

Its instrument, its consolation, the soul

"Down the avenue, into the lost bayou..." *

And loses it there for fun, glad to shuffle off

At last its mortal coil, each blossom's

Mute gasp an acme which defines

Insolence and modesty fused and anew.

Stereo means stone, of all things,

But also duplicity, or like an ass, in Slavic

And mimetic tongues, cloven noise, for a rock's

Mockery of the real, and these rolling parabolas,

Their fugues of paradox and pun

Vitiating referential meaning, assuaging

Its losses and consequent terrors, madness

And freedom, with relentless momentum

And an opening of the bottom which taunts

Dread of the rhapsode, dervish and queen

In everyone, a candid travesty imposing

With strict articulate delirium its formulae

Of pleasure: imitate me feigning

To imitate you with insincere mimicry

Of your inner minstrel falsetto

Until the larynx and the lynx, equally hairy

And mercurial, open like flowers for our

Tunnel-of-love heroics and more, the maenad's

Revenge for wasting her time, the epicene's

Repellent hilarity, each petal a dog's tongue

And red flag flapping, "Wish you all were there!

Hope we meet again!"** a shouted lisp,

Its insinuations compulsory and obscenely

Smelly as phosphorescent fish scales

When the fish is gutted and clean

As an orange daylily at night, gently nodding

Or philosophically still and bright.

* "She Was Hot," The Rolling Stones
** Ibid