A Poem for a Thursday #149

Linda Pastan is an American poet who was the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991-1995. She is known for writing poems that are about family life, loss, the female experience, and the temporary nature of the human experience. I featured another of her poems here.

A painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.  Édouard Manet

When I pass you this bowl
of Winesaps, do I want to say:
here are some rosy spheres
of love, or lust--emblems
of all those moments after Eden
when a pinch of the forbidden
was like spice on that first apple?
Or do I simply mean: I'm sorry,
I was busy today: fruit is all
there is for dessert.

And when you picked 
a single bloom from the fading bush
outside our window,
were you saying that I am somehow
like a flower, or deserving of flowers?
Were you saying
anything flowery at all?
Or simply: here is the last rose
of November, please
put it in water

But as for clouds,
as for those white, voluptuous
cummuli floating overhead,
they are not camels or pillows
or even the snowy peaks 
of half-imagined mountains.
They are the pure shapes of silence,
and for now, yes.
The clouds are saying 
all I want to say.

All I Want to Say
Linda Pastan