Hi, Alex!
I'm having trouble parsing some of the sentences in this, to distinguish the main subjects and verbs from the modifying phrases and clauses. Some of that confusion can be cleared up via punctuation, I think. For example:
Within the summer garden's lustrous hour (1)
when light transmutes to pearls and golden shower, (2)
that course through trembling petals they ensnare, (3)
each moment shimmers poised in jeweled air. (4)
Moving the comma from the end of L2 to the end of L1 and adding a comma after "shimmers" in L4 would clarify a lot:
Within the summer garden's lustrous hour, (1)
when light transmutes to pearls and golden shower (2)
that course through trembling petals they ensnare, (3)
each moment shimmers, poised in jeweled air. (4)
Since the rules say relative clauses beginning with "that" cannot be separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma, the comma before "that course" turns "that course" into an adjective and noun, and the antecedent of "they" becomes unclear. I suggest reviewing the difference between "that" and "which"
here, and then either eliminating the comma before "that" or changing "that" to "which" (which
can have a comma in front of it).
"golden shower" should be "a golden shower". The poem can handle a little metrical flutter better than it can handle the weird artificiality of an omitted article, in my opinion.
Next sentence:
With sovereign grace a butterfly alights, (5)
its wings aflame in its sustaining rites, (6)
its silken amber meets the crimson heart (7)
of bloom, as each partaker plays its part— (8)
until all boundaries melt in vibrant praise, (9)
wing, petal, flare in variegated daze, (10)
entwined as heady nectar's ritual sip (11)
effuse new secrets in their primal grip. (12)
That sentence is too long and unwieldy for my taste. The comma at the end of L6 should be a period, because "butterfly alights" and "amber meets" are both independent subject/verb sets. That means that there are two complete sentences here, inappropriately spliced by a comma. There's another comma splice at the end of L9 that should be a period, too.
I would change L10 to avoid the meter-driven omissions of little connective-tissue words — perhaps something like "Wings' and petals' variegated daze / entwines..." LL11-12 are a tangle of nouns and verbs that don't always watch in number the way I'm expecting.
There are lots of comma splices in the remaining lines of the poem, but I'll stop there.
Yes, poetry can break the rules, but generally there are good reasons for those rules, so there need to be even better reasons for a poet to break them. Comma splices are frowned upon because readers need adequate time for one sentence to sink in and be appreciated before they get hit with another. In my view, each comma splice robs two sentences of the power they would have if allowed to stand alone.
If you still want to create a breathless effect by replacing periods with commas, then your sentences will need to be less convoluted, so that the velocity of not being allowed to pause for long doesn't interfere with the reader's ability to digest all those subjects and verbs.
Cheers,
Julie