Want To See Poem by Daniel Trevelyn Joseph

I love to read poetry.
Today was reading ‘Edge’
By Sylvia Plath – what
A musical name! Nevertheless
She committed suicide soon

After, deliberately edged herself out;
The poem has one image, ‘as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens’, made me think
Whether I have seen it happen.

Cut out, O poet! everything;
Leave only a few essentials,
The reader will weave the net,
Make the image and even
Fall down to worship, trapped.

Cuts across my mind
Memory of something else,
Read a few days ago;
Wanting to recall an image
From a poem by R M Rilke.

In parallel, my mind
Runs to a scene in Khopoli
Where I saw the white lilies
Close even by eleven o’clock
In the morning, amid round leaves.

But roses, whatever I have seen
The petals wither and widen
And become flaccid like all,
And fall away; don’t recall
Seeing them ‘closing back’

Searched and searched and got
What I wanted: the line
From Rilke: in his ‘Orpheus.
Eurydice. Hermes’: “her sex had closed,
Like a young flower at nightfall”.

That is ok; flowers some close
In the dark: but, queenly roses -
I want to see the rose garden,
Not of Eliot but of Wordsworth,
Whether the roses close or wither.