TIMOTHY DONNELLY is co-poetry editor of The Boston Review. Through a Darkness, an Intelligence On analysis, even roses aren’t what you supposed. Take a closer look, go deep enough to feel that you’re an aphid now, or smaller, a microscopic version of yourself and delving in a velvet den of quickened petals. That you were killed once on some road trip you’re at odds to recollect, brilliantly ill-fated, numbered parts of you removed, excuse me if I notice. You know that’s what I do. Also, there are more of us. A whole company of spirits nests among this flustered damask and delights here, accounting for that fragrance one in ignorance ascribes to botany, a bland and hasty explanation, but you see how it appeals to Mrs. Osborne in her garden, who’d falter if she knew the pleasure she derived from breathing in her ruby floribunda’s essence meant that, for an instant, reddish beings had possessed her. No matter that they’re pleasant, brief in overwhelming. Just leave her to her science, what satisfaction it affords. You, however, asked me why it seemed, just yesterday, a power dragged you through a darkness, an intelligence unbidden, surely not your own. You felt it penetrate as thieves would sack a vaulted treasury found long since emptied out, cacophonous with spite, directing you through frost and sudden blight and canker, well beyond the lot of, for example, Mrs. Osborne, who, as fate would have it, rose from breakfast at that time. You approach me for an answer. I hand you  what you want. You have been given another life. Pansies Under Monkshood The sun broke: opportune. Opossum-stopped at twenty-two, he cloistered shunt and jobless, kept to a kidney- shaped plot of herbs, the arch medieval types (take rue), a dense aroma-veil of beauties haloing the deadly. The proximity of cure to curse, what blasphemy he knew occurred in nature naturally (at once in scammony) he honored, a clot of pansies under monkshood nodded softly and obeisant, in pallor plotted, pallid. God he gardened, darkly. Extraneous, neighbors stuck an eyeball to a knothole wincingly and whispered coarse outside his family fence. Whatever squeeze-faced critic ridiculed, he heard (or overheard — or heard) with tightening, what she said. He’s catastrophic, look: a knot of inwardness and waste. A buttercup. A bird, he feathered off from talk in tongue of other-mouth, dumbness fledged into an art. See before him Francis. See before him compost, a mound of it, the moist rot monitored with heart. He makes a final tulip-hole by hand, without a tool, and lays a lambkin bulb to rest. (The cultivar: Attila.) A little blood, a little bone, a little ritual completed heavingly, the last he’ll know of company till March, maybe even April. In the meantime: basement. Dusty, misdefined. Reading? He will read: unoccupied, "the mind rusheth into melancholy." Windowed, he will watch an autumn’s fancy branchwork, the crocus spitting gold- dust stigma-tassle (saffron), but mourn the patch of purple browning by the brick, the offal-air of mold and loveless decomposing. Chiller nights approach; acorns tap the minutes on a shake-shingled roof in creepy repetition; the world he watered fallen into incremental desert, he drops: a rattled gourd, an evacuated basket. Poor churl, he needs the solace of a doll, a vacant entity to split his troubled thinking with. Small wonder he should practice acts of — what exactly? A worsening, a cold; a cold knocked back forever deeper into, he’s tilled himself an organ of perennial arcana, cell-walled, willed root-veined rock from under underground. He should finish applications, find a living friend not shear / A decade before his first death he would lay / a shirt of disconcerted madras magicked from the mouth of a cellar cedar closet. Full spectrum short the violet / askew on the bed of a dank room developing / hues alive with correspondence, scotched: he embryos a consort concentrating deeply (as directed in his plinth- thick copy of The Pocket Book of Witchcraft), / headshots of those who would one day be wrung / scissors held aloft to catch the incandescence. For to fill it up: let the head unstitched. For to eradicate the curse: / null of quarrel and song, a whole roll of heavenly / Rocky Mountain grape starred "highly recommended." He considers, but the range: elsewhere, noted. The buttercup? Useless. Onward nonetheless. "Luck is got by cinnamon," but powders though the cotton fragrantly and mocks him / shut favorite faces, dreamt photos to paste / a singe of scheme and mothballs. He wants the danger of November night and blasted weather, its celestial, stark / in the radiant album / the grimoire flipped through: TRANCE, GLAMOUR.  Scotched. He backwards to the plot, the heretical book / embossed with THE GONE, its / rescue: an old grammar, stammering, en pleine air! Stood among the skeleton / fluke pages turned to and bent over nights / stiffed in bone- yard season, he / creased / Puck, I’m here, in fernwither, full moon, in silent midnight, come — Your, believer. Silence, still / in a sea-toss and saturnine chanting "alone, / he fingers lost delphinium, thumbs the index down: WOODRUFF to WOOD SORREL, WORMWOOD to WOUNDS. Back to WORMWOOD, his time contends with him / alone," / The herb ends "small bewitchments," soothes the bite of salamander, serpent. Some claim. Burned by graves, raises "spirits to speak…." Scotched. / he abandoned himself on the false-bottom bark / / to belief he could grasp / Conjuring? A flashlight. He strips the brittle leaves of artemisia off, a pinch of rue for mercy (should this business go awry), plucked laurel for protection / ways of grief by imagining / in addition, "prophecy through dreams." Watch: three o’clock. The double full but only half, he circumspects a second: the granite’s mossy in the wall: a bounty, velveteen! He turns to MOSS / all who would die dying well in advance / good for "general-purpose poppets" but for optimal results, whet a "dew-rinsed knife" and "flense a headstone’s growth." Laid askew, awake envisioning his visit / each pang to the ventricles / practicing a grief- stricken look to throw the bony gatesman, a classic ending is contraptioned: A pleasure sloop, a nefarious reef, and all of them at once. / studied, withstood, each tragic scenario / The truth: blasphemous. / pictured and stuck / Anyway, the artifice / in the propped open book / comes easier: an uptown bus. See before him Swan Point, the park of marble monument to highbrow charnel. (His own are laid to rest forever less exquisitely, capped with unremarkable lawn-flush plaques.) He wheezes at the gate, walks past without a word, but the pawns loom mossless, moon-scrubbed; trouble has been taken, meaning met again. A stiffening (exhaust). Out of the pockets: an unknown key, an ambiguous token. What weed remainder’s this? Quickly, a (something)              burning down to ash, for — what exactly? For he is eager for                                          THE DEAD:  DER NACHTSCHWÄRMER I know a shape that knows its way around our park, whose panther-musked and sparkling coat entices — then appalls! It should be chained by park officials. All day it lurks about unseen beneath the band of evergreen that cordons off our curfewed park; it slinks among our founding fathers’ watching pine, does damage to their sap-filled trunks and leaves one ill at ease. Tonight a troop should trap it, bind it up with iron and rope. But night is quite a different game, now, isn’t it? I know a shape of such intelligence that it waits till night displaces day to spring from fallen needles. Then it rises, grunts, and bang! it lunges from the boughs that hang so low as to conceal it underneath. And when it makes it to the lawn, so ticked it glows below the moon, a grille of teeth is cruelly borne, the tongue contorts: you’re licked with lechery and wet. Tonight a troop should trap it, bind it up with iron and rope. But night is quite a different game, now, isn’t it? I know a shape with eyes reflecting stars, they mesmerize! whose quick-seducing gaze will bore through barriers and barriers: you fill with thoughts much less your own, your knees at once begin to buckle and you fall beneath the shape, ah! life’s unlucky. You breathe and bleed its breath and blood, you intertwine your legs with its and wake up in a spill upon the bed. You’ll wish it had been stopped. Tonight a troop should trap it, bind it up with iron and rope. But night is quite a different game, now, isn’t it about to start: a theater of puckered whelps and pathogens from humming pumps, a secret door, a sodden hall, a carousel of shadow palps divining where the flattered vein begins. You’re swept away by caravan, you’re miles from an old concern— what was it once, an emptiness, a ticket? With another fume, another face, another turn in the sticking-place with silver-tongued constrictors in the socket, odd cologne! And now, with rumbling, comes a troop to bind you down (or is it up?) and you allow it as the shape assumes your own.  For a Missing Face When to go would suffer me beyond myself, sloshed in the stomach of an ill-upholstered coach bound south, consumed, my will belittled by the vast mechanic will of an engine lunging on, the vent-shot air irrevocably soured by surrounding mouths, spoil, my face mistaken for a missing face, a general spasm down a darkened aisle; when to stay would stifle as a vault of skin, a masterstroke of disproportion in the woolens worn, the vapors of a strange creation born and breathed back in, as if to asphyxiate self with self induced a more judicious choking; when to choose would leave me lost without or lost within; when the spleen’s pulsed music rises, falls — I take to the air as you took to the stair, my fled example; when the walls streaked sallow threaten to collapse, I will not give in so awkwardly as that. See the one hand fixed to the gothic rail? See the other hung, as though ’twere casual?