Whether

Aligned with the mechanism

whereby the spirit is borne aloft

through song comes again

the question: whether. And not soothed

so much as opened by the boy

soprano’s Sanctus, what moves

in the mind as the throat constricts

in sympathy, one note peeled

from the last, fine as paper slipped

from a garlic bulb, veined,

translucent, is whether—as if

wound through the spiraling

amplitude, purpled, fretted,

one voice suspended

in concentration of prayer or terror

wills itself above faltering,

more perfect since time must

soon break it. And made it.

Whether and by whatever impossible

arrangement of stars, harmonies,

correspondences through which

the music finds the spirit and like

a blade slits and releases,

circulates the question

through the phrase, the delicate

engine—as if it matters: the song

rises, everything goes with it.

The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, and

memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.