The crested iris by the front gate waves
its blue flags three days, exactly,
then they vanish. The peony buds'
tight wrappings are edged crimson;
when they open, a little blood-color
will ruffle at the heart of the flounced,
unbelievable white. Three weeks after the test,
the vial filled from the crook
of my elbow, I'm seeing blood everywhere:
a casual nick from the garden shears,
a shaving cut and I feel the physical rush
of the welling up, the wine-fountain
dark as Siberian iris. The thin green porcelain
teacup, our homemade Ouija's planchette,
rocks and wobbles every night, spins
and spells. It seems a cloud of spirits
numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy --
children grabbing for the telephone,
happy to talk to someone who isn't dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least
these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss.
Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all. One character, Frank,
distinguishes himself: a boy who lived
in our house in the thirties, loved dogs
and gangster movies, longs for a body,
says he can watch us through the television,
asks us to stand before the screen
and kiss. God in garden, he says.
Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,
I'm almost convinced. In this geometry
of paths and raised beds, the green shadows
of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling:
some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space.
Maybe because it contains so much dying,
all these tulip petals thinning
at the base until any wind takes them.
I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in,
and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is
subjectively. As blood is utterly without
an outside, can't be seen except out of context,
the wrong color in alien air, no longer itself.
Though it submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times,
though not for me, since at their first entry
into my disembodied blood
there was nothing at home there.
For you they entered the blood garden over
and over, like knocking at a door
because you know someone's home. Three times
the Elisa Test, three the Western Blot,
and then the incoherent message. We're
the public health care worker's
nine o'clock appointment,
she is a phantom hand who forms
the letters of your name, and the word
that begins with P. I'd lie out
and wait for the god if it weren't
so cold, the blue moon huge
and disruptive above the flowering crab's
foaming collapse. The spirits say Fog
when they can't speak clearly
and the letters collide; sometimes
for them there's nothing outside the mist
of their dying. Planchette,
peony, I would think of anything
not to say the word. Maybe the blood
in the flower is a god's. Kiss me,
in front of the screen, please,
the dead are watching.
They haven't had enough yet.
Every new bloom is falling apart.
I would say anything else
in the world, any other word.
Copyright 1993 My Alexandria: Poems by Mark Doty University of Illinois Press