The Literary Review
Robert Graves on the Briar and the Bramble Rose
To me, both briar and bramble
arrive prior to the ample
flower called a rose. Prickly stems
that scratch the hands that planted them,
these bushy shrubs require a glove
just to manhandle them. What’s love
got to do with all those thorny
questions that now sound too corny
to bother to answer them. Rose
with all those pretty petals grows
out from a thousand cuts and scrapes,
makes me see red, blood red, that takes
me to another time and place,
tangled images of your face.
- Deborah H. Doolittle
E. M. Forster on Two Kinds of Flower Arrangements
One kind thrusts its virtues to the sky,
trusts the sun enough to open up
despite the wind and rainy weather,
the higher, the better, the bigger,
too: pistil, stamen, petal, sepal,
bract all tacked on to the ends of stems.
And who supposes roses to do
otherwise? Gaudy, showy, oozing
confidence in the garden, along
the fence. But in hedges and under
edges of beds and woods, another
kind emerges. More discrete, it climbs
up the stem just like a leaf will tend
to do, and gladly, too. The way they
dot the field and garden plot appears
to be an afterthought, supporting
cast at best, though equally blessed by
the sun, the one true star hour by hour.
- Deborah H. Doolittle
Pittaluga’s Two Nymphs
(after two statues in the National Gallery of Art)
One of the Woods, the other, the Fields,
these two nymphs stand on plinths,
not pedestals, from which columns
would naturally rise, but in their case,
don’t, keeping them life-sized and able
to look at us passers-by right in the eye,
should they ever happen to look up.
Both are as delicate as porcelain or Parian
china, paler than alabaster, smoother
than silk, softer than marble. Their free-
flowing robes drape in fluid folds around
their hips and limbs almost suggestively.
The one holds up with both hands a flowering
twig; the other pinches a posy.
Both look as though they were sipping
cups of tea in high Victorian society, their dainty
pinky fingers extended. Within their niches,
surrounded by a dusky, dusty blue
background, they could be two distant
clouds of the cumulohumilis kind,
or cameo portraits by Wedgewood.
They seem to know where they stand:
the one in front of a tree trunk;
the other before a tuft of grass.
Their hair, parted in the middle, drifts
casually from ribbon-like headbands
across their brows and over their eyes,
which they obstinately keep downcast.
- Deborah H. Doolittle
Field, etc.
Full of flowers equals meadow
or mead. Full of grass, it’s a lawn
or mall or sward, that old-fashioned.
Hay here, corn there, cotton and soy
bean almost everywhere. When
a poet walks through, she’s the part
of the field that is not a field,
not the air, either, though she breathes
it in as an elixir, then
exhales particles of herself
into the wind, the neighboring
pasture, bearing seeds of wild deeds,
sowing her own needs like things that
need weeding. After departing,
she leaves a path that vanishes;
the field grows to know her absence.
- Deborah H. Doolittle
Quixotic
When you say quixotic, I see those places
where pagodas, pyramids, ziggurats
take vacations with us. Heavenly traces
of gardenias of Eden, bergamot
oil, oolong tea sometimes slip off my tongue.
Ginger, the prominent spice that ignites
my appetite. A pair of white oxen
appear out of nowhere to our delight.
To say quixotic more than once is twice
as nice. Not like lightning strikes, I tend to see
tulips, windmills whirling. To say it thrice,
a flame that licks the wick to a new degree.
Nothing’s more mercurial than your wit,
and quicksilver can never be too quick.
- Deborah H. Doolittle
No Forbidding Morning
The dark side of dawn
pours its thick brew on
everything. Bitter
as yesterday’s pot
of coffee. Sweet as
the extra cream you
need to stir into
it. You sip your drink
and wait for it. All
these rituals, your
humdrum routines, the
motions you go through
keep you feeling numb.
There’s no denying
that morning will come.
- Deborah H. Doolittle