Where lie the flowers on the peak,
Lie too the ghostly hands that pick them.
Blossoms folding into themselves,
In pockets against the pickers breasts.
He borrows books from me. the Epic of Gilgamesh, he says, is the first book he has read for fun since he was a kid. He likes to re-read it —a story about friendship and the impossibility of cheating death.
“He’s weird like me,” I think, and let him keep it.
White mountain daisy
Bracts of wool-shrouded moonlight:
Not petals in truth.
He pulls a moth from the air and plucks its wings.
His girlfriend laughs and says, “anyone who wouldn’t do that is a bitch.”
She looks like Stevie Nicks, whom he always called an angel.
She is the only person he is always gentle with.
She can sit on the beach and watch him for hours.
Should her wings be plucked,
Would the ocean whisper to her,
Like some arbitrary, unliving god?
And the birds caw, cackling,
Unknowing in their reptile brains,
What is whispered to her? Heaven forbid.
Sweet moon drops: anthers rest,
Pressed in books on dream-hewn shelves.
Shuttered, word-strewn diadem:
In clouds of pollen, seep.
I watch in disgust as the moth writhes, but we’ve seen him do worse lately. Someone else makes a joke, too stupid for me to remember. To see cruelty, and smile, and make a joke, or to say nothing at all: we are all bitches tonight.
We go inside, and he compliments my sunglasses. I let him wear them, and she sees my telecaster, and asks him to play it for us. We know how well he can play, but he is on something and can’t play anything at all.
They are leaving. “You’re still wearing my sunglasses,” are the last words I say to him.
Words written fondly,
Obscured in the mind’s pollen:
Petals laid to rest.
But I see and hear: A surfboard. A fight. A cell. A fishing boat. A needle. Another fight. Another cell.
A pill pressed with fentanyl. A flower pressed in a journal. A tattoo under his eye that says “faith.”
A dream from which he doesn’t wake.
A moth plucked from the air.
