Unattainable

Patrice Pinette

 

“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream” ~ Novalis (1772-1801)

 

The romantic poet, Novalis, adored a blue flower.

Searching for it in his novel, he found it in a dream

of a dream, compelling and beautiful.

 

Another man takes pictures; for him blue is the outline

of clouds giving form to the sky’s emptiness; and a shirt

that brings out the blue of his eyes; and also his

 

blue coffee mug that gives weight to waking, anchors

his morning to blue hills and blue roads. A blue flower

allures, but make no mistake; it is not every man’s

 

Soror Mystica. Novalis’ blue petals: still pressed

between pages of his book; while the photographer’s

white flowers are at large. A day like a dream

 

remembered but never reentered—the film

in his camera hastily put in backwards—when he went

to develop the miracle of what he saw with his eyes

 

there was nothing. And never forgotten:

black woman with a thousand silver-studded braids

and an armful of white lilies in Forsythe Chapel,

 

where the light, not the lilies but the white of them

in her arms, radiant as a shaft

through the stained glass that day made them,

 

and the Bride he worshipped all of his life

kept her back toward him, spilling her fountain of lilies,

never to turn around.

 

Patrice Pinette is from Wilton, New Hampshire and has taught creative writing to high school students, as well as classes in speech eurythmy, which translates poetry into dance. She has led poetry workshops for adults in the Antioch New England Waldorf  Teaching Training Program. Her poetry has been published in Concrete Wolf, Flash!Point and elsewhere. Patrice has three chapbooks: Architects of Madness, Down from Temple Mountain, and Awake and Dreaming. She is working toward her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.