Homage to Rosengarten

If you have a wall, a bare wall in your house All the walls in my house are bare And I love the bare walls The only thing I would put up On one of my beloved bare walls Not beloved It doesn't need beloved It doesn't need an adjective The wall is fine as it is But I would put up a Rosengarten A Rosengarten produced with a wooden Comb and black ink Going nowhere forever in a swirl of indelible parallel curves Is it a letter or a woman? It is another perfect startling black letter in a word Among hundreds of words In a continuing Rosengarten epic that celebrates Mankind's holy and relentless desire for itself Your heart is the same as the white paper Upon which the woman is so carefully splashed Both need her in order to become significant If you had a vast white wall And if you hung hundreds of his commanding women in a row You would not have to study the calligraphy For very long To understand and to forgive yourself For falling in love so often And for championing our mysterious and radiant race And it would silence whatever foolish argument About beauty You had been tricked into embracing And it is the same with a piece of furniture I have one or two wooden tables That I bought for a song long ago I've polished them for years And I don't want anything on them Except elbows a plate and a glass But I have a Rosengarten on one of them Because a Rosengarten celebrates the wood it stands on Because it is made with the same mind That made the table a hundred years ago The mind of honour and skill and modesty That patiently manifests an artifact Of unutterable usefulness You would have to live with a Rosengarten To know how useful it is As useful as a table or a wall To serve your helplessness To locate your “wrecked life” in a room You have forgotten to explore Just as there is no extra word in a great poem In a Rosengarten There is no extra volume There is no gesture, no conceit, no winking eye Soliciting a compliment It is as it is Respectful of the tradition from which it arises But independent of it too It stands there surrounded by the room Establishing second after second New alarming original friendships with the air and the light Which the room so deeply needs To irrigate and refresh your struggle And if you have a garden or an acre And you want it to flourish Place a number of Rosengartens here and there His great commanding Asherahs The streamlined female presence Which men and women sought and worshipped In the “high places” of the Bible And still do today As we walk hand in hand Through the bewildering and shabby insignificance Of our official corrected public and private daily lives And here She is: Fully born from herself Urgent and accommodating A thrust of polished energy that does not cut the air But softens it and ignites it softly Offered up on a simple stone staircase Which in itself is a masterpiece of escalating harmony Offered to the mystery of beauty Which no one dare explain Offered up for the secret reasons Which are known to all Offered up in the usual conditions of distress And the deep inner certainty of perfection And now your garden Does not need reminding