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Every soul is, and becomes, that which she contemplates.
                                                                        — Plotinus IV.3.8

The nameless is the fetal beginnings of everything
that is happening,
While that which is named is their mother.
                                                          — Dao De Jing, Chapter 1


I

Many’s one hundred thousand varieties
purple molecules
line a wine cup
still less than the one
unnameable and lived in Rome as elsewhere
too large to be contemplated.


II

When the gate swings open
white, paint-coated hinges—
                                            dianthus in their pink,
                                            magnolia-slippered ground,
                                            Acer Japonicus,
                                            bending slender red.

Atoms are discrete fluid,
blur perfumed spring and whitened red.

Desire parses star-petal soil,
comet pink, quivering
maple leaf stems.


III

Rose trapped in the corner, gasping
in the chlorophyll way for air,
attacked by skeletonizing insects and mould.

Intelligence leans to the slightest breeze,
leaves curl, struggle in the pale shade
hell’s cold rains. She opens
her crimson mouths doggedly
a ruined bride: green body pummelled
heat, cold, wet and dry weathers,
obscured boundaries:
house and fence.


IV

Mind: tarnished silver sluice
              flesh in a doorway
blue with hematomas and sprains.
We name each other in a paradise of the seventh day,
our bed the altar; ecstasy our children’s names.
A house of trees left behind
silver tossed to the desert floor.


V

A way, no name for the way,
no way to name it.

We sleep above the garden:
               blur of pink and green like
               a two-year old daughter’s circle skirt
               her joyous twirling.

Souls connect in heresy
bob in the cosmos:

we float in Plotinus’s famous sea
feet barely touching bottom.