Bonaventure’s Proposition

Redolent and obstreperous are two words
Spring light, midmorning brings to mind.
A light whose heavy rollers and rip tides
Pull houses to its sea all sheets to wind.
Strange to watch the stoic rows unmoored
With trees made fo’c’sles, whose raucous lookouts—
Starling, finch, and jay—become reborn
Under nautical genus with seabird’s titles:
Spring is a careless evolver; a Heraclitan,
Who surfaces her flowing daffodils to glow
As phosphorous to muted, plankton lawns.
So my suburb is armada loosed to Lux,
The lordly current, both corporeal and spirit,
Who gives lyric charter to winter’s still,
Whose earth is roiling flux beneath the sun.
Thus existence, essence, listing light conjoin
Three and also one, whose river ocean
Suffuses seaborne gold and bacchanals of grace;
Permits no word to taste of it beyond abstraction;
Renders each a helpless hand to catch its flow.

Luke Irwin

Luke Irwin

Luke is pursuing an MDiv at Covenant Theological Seminary. His poetry and stories have appeared in a handful of publications, and "A Bow from My Shadow," a chapbook he co-wrote with Alex Miller Jr., w