The Mandarin Orange Tree

Like water traveling through an unseen silk
Its odor captures all the threads of space,
Re-weaving them until each fiber's filled
With what remains when color's been erased.
Or might it be one drop of silk that stains
A water's depths, an ocean in the air?
Now water's silk! Silk's water! —Still unchanged:
This smooth continuous perfume everywhere.
Beneath the tree's dark foliage there pause
Two men conversing of events in time,
Of sweat and strain, of stern unbending laws,
Laws lost within this unseen cloud's sweet rhyme,
This orange silk adrift, this orange sea
Where boundaries between garments melt and blend
And swooning, vanish into fragrance. See—?
Where one begins the other never ends.



2013 © R. Nemo Hill