The Orchid Thief

I am the stalker of ghosts

Who takes what he loves;
My hand seizes emptiness
And holds it up to the light.
Passion takes me over,
Possesses me beyond reason;
I enact the mysteries of evolution,
The endless chain of cross-fertilization.
O infinity of species,
Exquisite and bizarre!
Fantastic adaptations,
Beautiful mutants,
I want to own them all.

Bewitched, I haunt the mirror;

Incurable lust, divine corruption
Tempt me with thoughts of murder.
Praying to the goddess under my skin,
I nurture a single seed year after year
Though, even should it blossom,
It may wither in an instant and be gone.
I crave the revelation so badly,
Desperate for its light to guide me;
Staggering under barren skies,
I need the sudden promise of love.

Dandy aristocrat in black,

Lonely with the castle keys in hand,
Afraid of what lives in the locked room,
I flee from the court of mirrors.
Xanadu’s dome glows in the night,
Far off, beyond the marshes.
These extreme blooms are my children;
They speak to me and lure me,
Seduce me with intelligence, with sensuality,
Terrible hermaphrodites,
Creative at the root.

Thrive, my darlings, live the quick years through,

Your saintly haloes to awaken me.
Love only the one who loves and protects you,
And never bloom in any other’s hands.

Lake Maggiore

On a lakeside terrace in the evening,

Musing over a glass of Bardolino,
With the scent of jasmine in the air,
Jewelled lights igniting along the shore,
And distant isles hovering
Between heaven and earth…

The pomegranate sun breaks open,

An explosion of seeds on the breeze:
The taste of figs is never forgotten,
Nor lemons’ radioactive glow.

This peculiar microclimate calls me

To consciousness, feeling the spring
On my face, a parrot set free in the air
In a hushed garden moored on a cloud.

Canonical love authorizes me here

In my weakness, my searching desire,
The possessor possessed, born to plunder
What sense I can from senselessness.

Water lilies and lotus blossoms

Float in the ghostly villa gardens
Where melancholy captains the heart
Silently across dark chartless seas.

Nefertiti
You will find no body, no remains:
She disappeared into the desert’s glow.
Such gentleness and melancholy touch her face,
Perfect and remote, this beauty commands trepidation and awe,
Severe in its symmetry and ritual.
From her hands she bestows love poems and sensual sculpture,
The dead in immaculate white linen robes set sail
On the river, and in the palace naked acrobats and dancers
Entertain the feasting nobles, as they toast one another
With endless cups of wine, and nibble at fine foods.
Birds sing in the palace garden:
Intoxicated with the blue lotus,
The female musician ,though copulating with a guest at the dinner party,
Refuses even then to put down her lute,
Still playing her bewitching music.
The queen’s eye hunts the wild lion through the air;
Her tongue catches glittering fish in its nets.
Smooth is her slender body all over, radiant-skinned,
Perfumed, and graceful, sinuous in her movements,
Her beauty rouses the gods, and gives them pleasure;
In the temple she receives the god into herself,
Shaking the sistrum ,irradiated by the sun,
Her body glowing through her diaphanous robe,
She opens her arms to the light, the uraeus ignites and sings,
As she chants adoration among the echoing columns,
And the sun holds the ankh to her lips.
She rides the sphingine palanquin of centuries,
Takes the reins of the chariot, galloping across the desert;
Her hand lifts the mace to execute the kneeling foe;
Her name is written in the horizon’s cartouche.
She is the burden of vineyards bowing to heaven,
Beehives oozing honey; ships’ bellies stuffed with grain and gold;
Precious stones from distant lands.
Sunlight blesses the benben stone.
See here the bust of a young and puissant queen,
Her face austere and serene, full of strength and equanimity,
Measuring justice with unfailing instinct;
And here the crone, with sagging dugs and gut,
Frowning in sorrow and resignation, at her fate,
Lonely, her sere womb exhausted of harvest.
The Apollo of Veii

Ceremony in terracotta :
This is the urgent moment before action,
The terrible approach of the god,
Held taut in suspense, all sharp lines
And harsh surfaces, etched out with a knife:
Will he speak ? His mouth seems charged
With explosion, as he advances in authority
To stop the trespasser Herakles
Bearing away the Ceryneian hind;
Striding forward, as if about to catch you
By the arm, to draw you into his orbit,
His face, sinister-handsome, bulging
With fierce energy, straining insanely
At the brink, eyes fixed on the target
In basilisk glare, head thrust right forward,
His uncanny smile so eager, playing
With your confusion, his cruelty superb.

Blue

A blue whale,
The sapphires of Golconda,
Lapis lazuli vases from China.

The Virgin of Chartres,

The field of the fleur de lis,
An Egyptian funerary statuette.

Young Werther’s frock coat,

Levi Strauss’s jeans,
The stained glass of Saint-Denis.

Hospital walls,
The Himalayas,
The earth’s atmosphere.

The fifth precious stone on the high priest’s breastplate,

The seventh in the cloak of the kings of Tyr.
And a pair of eyes.
Your eyes.

BEAUTY

This quality permits no indifference.

Beauty demands its due.
A paragraph from Chekhov,
Simple and right.

I show and control,

A lover of witchcraft,
An actor.
My mortal folly
Contains its own remedy,
Anti-venom
To the viper’s bite.

Dante sits writing a letter

To Can Grande della Scala,
Explaining the levels of allegory
In his Commedia.
Above his head, in the night sky,
The Pleiades spark into sight.

The last movement

Of Beethoven’s Eroica-
Silences.
Stillnesses.
It moves
Yet does not move.
To lose all,
That is the game.