The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

I could think it the mind's warm mine
digging through odours and movement
for veins of scarlet porphyry.
Excavating the light there
(it emanates from darkness)
is like finding the rich
but only among the poor,
like equating work with
remorseless destruction,
a kind of changelessness for me—
the more I think of it
the more I understand
nothing at all.
P a t r i c k
L a n e
Wysteria
You say wysteria and something plunders you, a mouth
heavy with blue as if it had spent the morning eating
grapes
or the heavy black cherries of childhood you picked
wild in the alien orchards of the desert hills. Words
come flowering, myriad
as if they grew in clusters on your tongue, as if
you were speaking to the grandmother
you never knew who they say sat
strapped in the chair for the last years of her life
asking for fruit from a tree that wasn't there.
Hers was a kind of frailty, tough and trembling,
like a scant branch you think if you take
will break. It can be like that if you want.
She wanted fruit for the pies they wouldn't let her make.
A trembling, as wysteria, or hands when you are still
a child that reach farther than they can to plunder