After midnight everything becomes musical
like the names of flowers: names of diseases, for
example, like pneumocystis
carinii pneumonia blossoming in your lungs,
its petals of infection closing the breath. I wouldn’t want
to make that beautiful, a self-congratulating sadness
in my blood. There are numbers of flowers
suitable for funerals whose names I don’t know, many
of them toxic if ingested. Rinse the affected area
thoroughly with cold water, irrigate
the blood: surely something will grow there, something
has to. The body is surely no grave. Like
Kaposi’s sarcoma, harsh syllables pronounced
across the skin, the purple lesions almost
hyacinth. No death is quite so flower-like, the god
(who was
in love, remember) turning away so not to spoil the
composition.
From that boy’s blood a single flower sprang, the gardens
of Adonis which wither within a week. I hate
the stupid flowers stealing youth. Beauty
is not an infection, contagion is no bloom upon the
cheek, the thorn
that takes the rose into the true. The death
of beauty is diagnosed by no flower. How afraid I am
of your outstretched hand, its petals
white and black and falling fingers.
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