Lotuses of Lucerne
Christopher Moya
On a canton road,
Alfresco scenting marigold
Aloft the loom of orchard grass just leeward,
The tipcart furrows weave
Bucolic lattices in mire.
I see stones in the wayside accent evergreen,
Boulders nesting hard by,
Rock pieces leisurely strewn,
As if Donatello had smote all day,
Then spirited the wrought slab away,
The footway hooks a gravel swath
Through plumes of beech
Gating the distant gallop,
From which the silent cliffs elope,
Stretching into leathern promontories.
Docks reach over the lake glass
That doesn't breathe a word
Of having borne a dory stern,
Or of the scattered madrigals of rain that come,
Or the reuss that enters like a dream.
On the Lenten shore and lowland
Sleeps a fetching hamlet,
The lodge guards antique embers,
And a steeple shoots its spike
Into alpine whiffs.
In the street winds odor of aster,
Lamps rustling with spent halogens.
A parlormaid slides up a gable dormer,
The tavern seething fumes of
Ale and Geneva
The limestone peaks peer down through thespian mist
Lost in grand soliloquy
And soak the air with streams like lemon balm
Hung fancifully on the morning wind
And dressing the descent with pretty mystery.
Down the slope, the Swiss pines promenade
And step their listing crags into Lucerne
The lake top napping still, hushed and virginal,
As if a prayer had stretched
To every strand and brink.
The coition of hue and shading, their discourse,
And aspect shared by every eye's beholding-
This cue stirs the mind,
As if I, too, were a watery glass
On which for light double chamois, spire, and maple,
As if my heart were, too, a canvas
On which to portrait the very likeness
And dance of color reined by a wood rim,
And seize the blood like a spice-
In a moment of heraldry,
Lotuses newly sprung
On stalks leaping the shrine of water,
Gleaming, liturgical,
And to feel is like the morn's first ripple
Stretching its orb in the flora shades.
To this place, I've never been,
But only felt its song
In green fir and glen,
In shrubs' and mughos' waving to the salmon.
I resonate
With hazel sides of stone
And the arabesque of edelweiss
That quiver at first light,
And in the turning away, rejoin a storm of furies.
But life's toil, though it beset the heart
With huge fires, titanic and leaping,
Has never fashioned anything so fierce
As a dewdrop's falling
Or a single wrinkle of water.
In gloaming, the outstretched orb may tire,
But it will never disappear.
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