Matt Donovan, my professor and an awesome poet:

[Dragonbreathp9d]

Here's a personal favorite by a man whom I have the pleasure of learning from:

What I Mean When I Say Blossom

is, yes, stargazers clumped in a vase & this morning beginning
to unfold, or the mesa's cobalt irises trying to engulf the withered
field. But also a boy slumped at a wall, lifting the gas soaked rag

to his face, a burn mark - I can't help it - curving across a thigh
& that air raid photograph, taken moments after, in which the land, too,
seems to bloom. There's a drawing Scotch-taped to my freezer,

scribbled in mulberry & teal, of Saint Dorothy clasping daisies
petaled with lowercase u's, or there's the Wal-Mart security screen
I watched become awash with backdrop light, effloresce, & turn

entirely white each time the doors hissed back & someone - looking
for a blender or butterscotch-sented candles - stepped into
the kind of bright, tiled space by now we can't live without. Within

Rorschach ink blot VIII alone, patients have seen coral reefs, baskets,
a bladder, a woman weeping who wears a green hat, Jell-O, Greenland,
fir tree in the distance, a coat of arms, iridescence of a bubble. Odd,

how I'm reluctant to give up this list, hoe it's easier to tell you
salamander, labia, ribs laid open, forest fire & canoe, even
Mother Goose without a neck, than finish what I'm trying to say.

Let's allow tonight, for as long as we can, for this word instead
to empty itself until it is nothing but sweetness & petals, until it means
only twilight, pear-white sand, our tongues thick with palm liquor.

Or only the mail-order orchid we keep not far from our bed. Each evening
at dusk - although it's futile & we're miles from any such thing -
it tries to lure a nocturnal moth by filling our room with its scent: citrus,

or cinnamon, or jasmine - we haven't quite placed it yet. No matter.
Our bodies will soon begin to move, or perhaps lie perfectly still,
& for awhile I won't need the name of anything at all to be clearer.



Matt Donovan
From "Vellum"
2007