GATHERING ROSEBUDS

For Angela Zack

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Old time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

Robert Herrick, “To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time”

Hesperides, Public Domain

INT. KANE'S BEDROOM - FAINT DAWN - 1940

A snow scene. An incredible one. Big, impossible flakes of snow, a too picturesque

farmhouse and a snow man. The jingling of sleigh bells in the musical score now

makes an ironic reference to Indian Temple bells - the music freezes -

KANE'S OLD OLD VOICE

Rosebud...

The camera pulls back, showing the whole scene to be contained in one of those glass

balls which are sold in novelty stores all over the world. A hand - Kane's hand,

which has been holding the ball, relaxes. The ball falls out of his hand and bounds

down two carpeted steps leading to the bed, the camera following. The ball falls

off the last step onto the marble floor where it breaks, the fragments glittering in

the first rays of the morning sun. This ray cuts an angular pattern across the

floor, suddenly crossed with a thousand bars of light as the blinds are pulled

across the window.

Herman J. Mankiewicz & Orson Welles, opening scene fragment,

Academy Award winning screenplay for the film,CITIZEN KANE, 1941

copyright, all rights reserved, RKO pictures, 1940; Turner Entertainment, licensee

I

The sacred opens for you the way you wish

And dream. Running when you should be sitting

Turning your lightning moves into mudras

Will take you into the garden before sunrise;

Can you stand the dark? Can you tell saguaros

From the shamans they used to be? Ask yourself:

Are you loping toward Lhasa, or Las Vegas?

II

We gather out of loneliness, and grope for fear

Of encountering no one. When you read my words

Don’t you find them strange, though the voice

Echoes your own, beckoning you back home?

How can a stranger help you do more than fix

your television or toaster? Yet doctors revive

Their patients in rooms painted bardo white.

Nobody dies before they live, once upon a time.

III

Your past lives are yesterday and the day before

if you pay more attention to the carpet stain

than the wine spilled. You disappear into smoke,

and your grand-nephews gobble cake and try

not to act bored. That is, if they are well-bred;

if they haven’t shed a real tear for a grey figure

now gone; if they can’t see the cord rise from

the coffin in effulgence, sensing that it’s you.

IV

Whatever gets your attention gets you. Have you

Found your own words for this on a wet slippery day

You cannot forget, because you braked in time?

Or on a hot scary night when you saw him keel over

But he didn’t, since you sent your love through the air?

Will you place rude stones by your path or cultivate

rosebuds? Will you do it in waking sleep, or not at all?