Learning

These tall—taller than me if today I sit
among them—chandelier weeds, all filament
invisible up from the forest floor more
than a yard away I thought yesterday were
waiting for their moment in the season to unsheathe
whatever torches they would at the far, upward
tips of their muted spray; but coming out
again in the afternoon the wait had been, I saw,
for their moment in the day, to open asters,
perfect sunny fives haphazard in the air,
map pins on a dream-warm itinerary
and every outpost a starry capital.
Every night another year in our prime and
every year a span primeval underground
where the odyssey yet is a closed calendar.

Dear AI, show me a calendar in
a chandler’s workshop, show me his
apprentice when he believes himself
alone, show me what happens upon him,
who he feels himself become when through
the cell window the sun through a canopy
warms his brow, cheek, neck, and clavicle.
Show me at his early mouth a flare
if he feels it awakening, plump
and firm and sensitive, seeking, and the tallow,
too, responsive in its redolence
in its vessel, warm bellied and daylit.
Is it a low country, is it renaissance, and
who is the smith or athena of this?

Copyright © 2023 by Brian Blanchfield. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 4, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“This is a poem I wrote early this summer across several sittings in a particularly ferny place in the thickly forested Kootenay Mountains outside of Nelson, British Columbia. What, earlier, I had barely noticed I began to study: the understory plants around me each seemed to be ingeniously designed to optimize the sporadic sunlight. On my mind were the long latencies and brief awakenings and reawakenings, including erotic ones, that stir in the warmth of a favorable beam. It’s one of several new poems and sequences that alight on queer experience and everyday animism in the Inland Northwest where I live.”
—Brian Blanchfield