Helianthus

I’m star-struck when I meet a sunflower
beaming down at me with coffee-brown cheeks
like someone leaning over the rail of a bridge
to admire their face unspooling in the coils
and furls of the water.

Though on closer contemplation, after my eyes
undazzle from its cadmium rafters
and descend the leafy scaffold fist-over-fist, I find
in the clenched green less of that easy demeanor.
A grip on something invisible.

Have you ever blundered through a field in summer,
scattering moltings of grasshoppers like reversed
hail? Once, one fear-flung by my foot-falls, insisted
into the air, landed in my open mouth, and clung
to my tongue till I spit it out.

That’s what it feels like when I see a sunflower,
or any flower, really. An urgent intrusion of the alien--
beauty I can’t keep but am compelled
to tell, though the rich jungle of revelation
always comes up short at the salt flats of speech.

And how is it that beauty is in (is it “in”?) all
those things that are not sentient of it (supposedly--
((I have to imagine there are depths we mere beholders
cannot fathom-- what the sunflower alone knows
about its yellow-- Some yellow feeling,

(((some entelechy of yellow))))))?