Two point six minutes on video: roses,
irises, daffodils, lilies, mums, opening
and opening as if opening
were the meaning of life, hard
to believe at my age. I watch for
the slightest caving of petals
at the edge of editing, before
the next opening, the hidden
collapse, the withering, but
it’s only the poetry of opening.
Prose goes on almost
invisibly, but when the lines
begin to shrink, the teachers want
to return and dig them up one
by one the way Emerson dug up
his wife’s coffin, unwilling to have
the end be the end, following
the relentless trail from bloom
to, well, the unspeakable, and
onward, if that’s the word for
what’s directionless and simply
what is, even the words for it
cluttering the sight, even the sight
cluttering sight. Might as well
exhume Cleopatra, who, contrary
to popular opinion, almost certainly
used a nice, soothing poison, not
an asp, in the tale that continues
to rise out of the dead ends
of her own self, transmogrified
into Elizabeth Taylor’s version of
Shakespeare’s version: unrolled
in gold from a carpet, as gorgeous
in death as a blossom opening,
arms falling against the floor like
petals spread, sexy and done-for.