Third Avenue Flat
a new collection of some elderly, long-neglected poems
by: Norman Hasselriis

to the impossible rosebud
the self unfolding freely
for another's impatient, imagical beholding
becomes revealed:
not quite as flashlit scenic hollows
of continuous-seeming landscape...surreally glimpsed
by night's somewhere-speeding passenger...
nor as any book's pages
(centerbound...not one left blank for the unwritten dream)

nor even as a random path  step     by       step      unfolds
successive mysteries of wilderness unhurried...

nor as might the stem-joined petals
of an impossible, slow-flowering rosebud
that would uncurl new textures
and kaleildescopicolors with each surprising layer...
each knowing nextmost
in tightwound swirl    surprising each itself

but is ever
quite refreshly delightful
as the bud's indivisible fragrance
promised and fulfilled...needing not
to be remembered      named or forgotten

and certainly as unpredictable
as winding path's next unseen danger or strange foliage

merely-beheld-slightly as it happened to become
ever withheld from all-final comprehensionawaiting
the revelations of contingently shared event

divided by two
as no rosebud would do
multiplied
by two-to-an-infinite-power

according to the ancient formula
unfound on any page
of any squarebound book
except:the very one left emptyand without a number

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One of Norman's Many Poems