Their Naked Petals

While Sophie lay in perfect symmetry

between death and life, I pictured Da Vinci’s

Vitruvian man stretched within the hoop of existence.

Her blood was summoned out of her body and wheeled

through a mechanical angel that breathed

it back from the blue of night sky

to the iron red of oxygen. While she lay still—

a copy of herself—drugged beyond an eyelid’s

flicker, a stray synapse firing, nothing

to waste a joule of strength,

I picked the tenderest string beans

on my son’s farm, thick fringe hanging

under leafy awnings,

some green, some a purple deep

as the dyes of royalty.

When the pods are young, each is so slight.

We harvested for hours to fill a lug,

mounding the slender bodies as the sun blazed.

We dug up beets, rude lumps

the gophers inscribed with their incisors.

We carried melons against our breasts,

fragrant with sugar and time. We all know

one life is not worth more than another,

but who does not beg for mercy?

Who does not want to be the one

who slips through the fence

when the god on watch turns away to take a piss?

The phone in my pocket rang and rang,

and with each call the odds fell.

I was already sweating as I started in

on the black-eyed Susans. Rows so yellow

it seemed such brightness could not have ruptured

from the dun-colored soil.

Tolstoy gave us the scene: Levin walking the streets

the morning after Kitty says she’ll marry him.

He’s dazzled by everything he sees—children

on their way to school, pigeons flying from a roof,

a hand arranging cakes in a shop window.

How is it that fear can also burnish the world?

The flowers opened their naked petals, shivering

gold in the hot breeze. I cut

only the freshest, centers packed with florets.

I stripped the leaves from the stems,

set them in water. One bucket and then another.

As the day wore on, the heat mounted, the light slanted

into my eyes. All I could see was the shadow

of the jagged corolla, blinded as I was by a sun

that I, for a moment, understood was a mortal fire

that would have its own death.

I remember the tough hairy stems. I remember

the green stain on my hands.

I remember my son with his face in his hands, my hand

on his shoulder, the bare muscle of his arm, his hardened palms.

And while Sophie lay still, unknowing as dirt,

we kept on—the gleaming eggplant,

the humble cabbages, the scarves of heat.