Lola Ridge

RADIANT notes

Piercing my narrow-chested room,

Beating down through my ceiling—

Smeared with unshapen

Belly-prints of dreams

Drifted out of old smokes—

Trillions of icily

Peltering notes

Out of just one canary;

All grown to song,

As a plant to its stalk,

From too long craning at a sky-light

And a square of second-hand blue.

Silvery-strident throat

So assiduously serenading me,

My brain flinches under

The glittering hail of your notes.

Were you not safe behind—rats know what thickness of—plastered wall,

I might fathom

Your golden delirium

With throttle of finger and thumb,

Shutting valve of bright song.

But if—away off—on a fork of grassed earth

Socketing an inlet of blue water …

If canaries—do they sing out of cages?—

Flung such luminous notes,

They would sink in the spirit,

Lie germinal …

Housed in the soul as a seed in the earth,

To break forth at spring with the crocuses

into young smiles on the mouth …

Or, glancing off buoyantly,

Radiate notes in one key

With the sparkle of rain-drops

On the petal of a cactus flower

Focusing the just-out sun.

Cactus … why cactus?

God … God!

Somewhere … away off …

Cactus flowers, star-yellow,

Ray out of spiked green;

And empties of sky

Roll you over and over

Like a mother her baby in long grass.

And only the wind scandal-mongers with gum trees,

Pricking multiple leaves at his wondrous story.