The Flower

Do you see this flower?
Its urgency to be and be again?
Its fragile mortal hour mocking, mocking, mocking?

Who can sustain their gaze not amazed?
It glories garishly, the flower;
In bloom harlots its fragrance to passers-by.

But these are old intimates; not passers-by.

In mid-morning sun the flower sweats its scarlet sugar.
Wafting pheromones seduce a bird lustful suddenly.

We are all suborned to the manic acquiesce
And carry tomorrow across our backs.

The flower sits like a wad of red taffeta twisted on a shivering hook:
I implore you to look.

Frolic today, flower. Rejoice in heroic utility.
Such meaning in a quick narrative.
The laws of a wilful genome obeyed,
Embedded in so much that is as it must be.

I can tell you the names of neither bird nor flower
For I am absorbed in the desperate spiral
No longer of the flower’s world
One not immersed in the genus of things.

Who are you to judge me so?
I, who would speak for us both, I who –
Wait. I have been encountered by
A yellow butterfly.
I have erred into its drunken path
And it has addressed me adeptly.
An endorsement of our moment.
I watch it limp upon the thin thermals toward
Its hallowed destination.

It sits in my gaze like the sun.

(c) Rhett Talley