Not Love

For KH

Summer dusks, sunglare planing the back

door, off-white paint curling

into flakes, fine ash, the wood weather-

worn and almost hieroglyphic, I lift

the potted plant, night-blooming cereus

flown east by a lover now distant,

and prop it on the warm stone steps

so the sheathes might ease

upward and each leaf bathe in deepening

glow. And grow. I tilt

water brimming the lip of a coffee can

onto loose, black soil, then spoon

what pools from the saucer. Such tender-

ness for these green yearnings,

slips whose only desire seems to be

to awaken into final simplicity.

Urge and urge and urge, praised Whitman.

I want to awaken when the cereus

flowers to clip one cold blossom

before it fails and press it between

ragged leaves of the 1892 "Death-Bed" edition

for that woman I couldn't love

long enough, and for whom, not loving,

I began to perfect these small,

sacramental gestures so that whatever tendril

flourished between us might still

thrive, and her gift, however fragile,

transmuted from the physical

world to the rough language of the text,

might, after death, survive.