POEM
Secret Life
Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake,
a boy growing old at the dining room table,
pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books
the flowers he picked all morning
in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus,
azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;
reading in another book their names he knows,
and then the names from their secret lives;
lives alchemical, nautical, genital;
names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;
secrets botanical
description could never trace:
accessory to empire, party to delusions of an afterlife,
kin to the toothed, mouthed, furred,
horned, brained. Flowers
seem to a boy, who doesn't know better, like the winged,
the walking, the swimming and crawling things abstracted
from time, and stilled by inward gazing.
Copying their pictures, replete with diagrams, he finds
in the words for their parts,
the accounts of their histories,
and their scattered pollen,
something to do with his own fate
and the perfection of all dying things.
And when it's time, he discovers in the kitchen
the note left for him that says
his parents have gone and will return by noon.
And when it's time, the dove
calls from its hiding place
and leaves the morning greener
and the one who hears the dove more alone.
Source: Poetry (December 2007).
This poem originally appeared in the December 2007 issue of Poetry.
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