David Donlon - poem


untitled

I have been driving by the roadside blue of late-June/early-July, the
	driveby blue, as I pass in my car, and I have wondered, Which

	blossoms are these, so blue? so numerous?
And my ideas begin, and they are already disagreeable.

Today I decided not to have any ideas except to love the blue roadside

	flowers in them. 
Or maybe to think less about what I could say about the flowers, just
	letting them be, and letting myself be 
	among them.

So I pulled over and wandered in amid them, and crouched down, trying
	to take their scents; 
Seeing how their leaves were acutely lobed, like a dandelion, and that

	their heads bore fifteen or more petals;
That their stalks were panicled, with many heads both blown and
	unblown.

And I organized these thoughts, as I got back into my car, against my
	own wishes; because I wanted the flowers just to be in my mind
	as I found them, but I knew already that once home books would

	bound off the shelves at me, requiring to be interpreted.
And that the flowers would never rest in my mind until they had been
	named.

Long ago this would not have happened.
I could have glanced at the flowers and thought "blue" and continued
	blissful, the thought in and out of my head in a second, and
	the flowers would have been only what they were in themselves,
	and nothing of what I might make of them.
And it would not have made one difference, either to me or to the
	flowers, that I saw them there on the roadside, so blue and so
	incalculable.
The day would have closed like any other day.

But it is no use now in any case.
Lacuica biennis; the Blue Lettuce, or much like it, is what I saw
	beside the road, in extended azure lines, just being in
	themselves!
And once I knew, it was not enough simply to know, but to make the
	thing permanent, and so here I am
	forming flowers into ideas one more time.

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