Pattiann Rogers

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"The Importance of the Whale in the Field of Iris"

They would be difficult to tell apart, except
That one of them sails as a single body of flowing
Grey-violet and purple-brown flashes of sun, in and out
Across the steady sky. And one of them brushes
Its ruffled flukes and wrinkled sepals constantly
Against the salt-smooth skin of the other as it swims past,
And one of them possesses a radiant indigo moment
Deep beneath its lidded crux into which the curious
Might stare.

In the early morning sun, however, both are equally
Colored and silently sung in orange. And both gather
And promote white prairie gulls which call
And circle and soar about them, diving occasionally
To nip the microscopic snails from their brows.
And both intuitively perceive the patterns
Of webs and courseways, the identical blue-glass
Hairs of connective spiders and blood
Laced across their crystal skin.

If someone may assume that the iris at midnight sways
And bends, attempting to focus the North Star
Exactly at the blue-tinged center of its pale stem,
Then someone may also imagine how the whale rolls
And turns, straining to align inside its narrow eye
At midnight, the bright star-point of Polaris.

And doesn't the iris, by its memory of whale,
Straighten its bladed leaves like rows of baleen
Open in the sun? And doesn't the whale, rising
To the surface, breathe by the cupped space
Of the iris it remembers inside its breast?

If they hadn't been found naturally together,
Who would ever have thought to say: The lunge
Of the breaching whale is the fragile dream
Of the spring iris at dawn; the root of the iris
Is the whale's hard wish for careful hands finding
The earth on their own?

It is only by this juxtapositiion we can know
That someone exceptional, in a moment of abandon,
Pressing fresh iris to his face in the dark,
Has taken the whale completely into his heart;
That someone of abandon, in an exceptional moment,
Sitting astride the whale's great sounding spine,
Has been taken down into the quiet heart
Of the iris; that someone imagining a field
Completely abandoned by iris and whale can then see
The absence of an exceptional backbone arching
In purple through dark flowers against the evening sky,
Can see how that union of certainty which only exists
By the heart within the whale within the flowers rising
Within the breaching heart within the heart centered
Within the star-point of the field's only buoyand heart
Is so clearly and tragically missing there.

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“I write about what interests me, those things about which I wonder and which arouse my curiosity, and I write about whatever I want to celebrate or honor. I want to create writing that pleases me, from which I learn something, and in which my imagination is at play to a high degree.
Some poems are prayers.” ___ Pattiann Rogers


Click here to read an interview with Pattiann Rogers:
http://www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_pattiann_rogers

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Today I'm listening to: Vivian Vance Kelly & Gary White - 'Got My Mojo Working'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSoV6DRC4OI

(She is the daughter of Vance Kelly; one of my favorite Chicago blues peeps)