To be a Fool for Beauty

you must be weirdly young or brazenly old,
alternatively, a sufferer and a worshipper, a defender

less driven by grievance (that old rut),
than curiosity,
and like your outrageous aunt who refuses to knit,
enchanted by bewilderment,

yet, irrevocably lost, and desperate, without
your partner’s goodnight kiss,
her smile in the low light.

True, the signs are real, the crown fires, the sky rivers,
are real,
the toxic cumulus, the wizened arbutus,

the fan palm shedding its propellers, the drought-cracks
in conifers, the ant invasion in the kitchen,
the vicious noise of Lockheed Martin,

grottos crumbling, cities excreting, our soiled empire,
with its fallen doctrine of eternal growth, turning

to the marvels of modern detergents, the whitening agents,
spreading,

a dusting of fascism, thickening, darkening,
dust devils hinting at tornados,

our attendant fear like a street dog following,

our convenient ear wax, our companionable cataracts,
Like in the thirties, my dad would have said, not enough alarm,

even the book of Revelation, despite its mythical construction
and preterist interpretation,
feels real.

Let the beauty of the Lord be upon us,
cried the Psalmist, anguished

like Judas, weeping and repentant,
on the highway from Golgotha,

like Mary Magdelene, at the open sepulchre, weeping, stooping,
peering,

and just here, at the point of giving up, the rose appears,
and one becomes its fool.