Bouquet

 Eventually it seems right to love the word, little silk-wrapped package 

of this-is-what-this-means-to-me; or pressed between the pages, 

like Aconite or Wild Sweet William, something from the crest 

of the Sierra, something from the crest of your spine, I mean, pressed, 

as I said, between the pale green linen sheets, soft peridot green.  

In the pre-dawn what is crucial is the smoothness of your side, 

the ascending gradients of hip and shoulder.  So many languages: 

the one of flowers, the one of love, the one of dreams; the language 

of row after row of chairs, abundant, shining, empty; the excess 

of trees just outside.   Every word an approximation, little package, 

small blue river pressed between canyon walls.  Flowers, 

I was saying they are like flowers. 

Each vanilla bud in a floral racene opens only once, then falls,  

like god after retiring god before another line springs up.  

Which of these is Eros?  His flower is rose, his mischief, thorn.  

It seems right to love the word, which is a draught 

from the bowl of source, a small song, an absence.  

Say a thing, or be a thing.  This is why the flowers fall one by one, 

each blossoming a transient awakening.  The Old Testament 

god doesn’t know his own name: I am what I am, he says, 

when pressed.  Between us, our daughter (Sweet Dianthus, Busy 

Lizzie, Impatiens), will show at dawn, creating space where there 

was none, and filling it.  You worry that she is late to speak—

but every day she learns three new words,  takes them into her 

little hands and wraps them in the silk of meaning, dismantling 

the thing we have told her is world, one name at a time.