Red Tulips in 1947

It lasts so long, bulks so large,
Exists in such high resolution
You think you might learn to like it
Once you got used to the silence,
The innocuous cuisine, the endless recycling
Of the garbagey past, for Eternity
Is only here and now on tap forever,
Exactly as that middlebrow fabulist Wilder
Imagined, each frame amenable to my summons,
Tame as a home movie, but with this difference,
That I can feel only what I felt
The first time round, the same
Small envies, stale longueurs, exasperations;
The same fretfulness, as when,
On a Thursday morning in 1947,
Having finished with the paper, I looked out
The kitchen window at a flower bed
Not ours, a neighbor’s—and watched red petals
Jittering in the wind. Those tulips
I didn’t see at all; rather, my frayed nerves
Found in them their own reflection, and now
Again, revisiting the scene, they are
My mirror and sympathetic fallacy;
Scentless, senseless soul’s amber;
Which I view and review like some minimum-
Wage security guard patrolling an empty store,
Video screen by video screen, from his post
Before a basement wall of monitors. Yet he is not
Entirely bored, for see on one screen
He can watch the tape he made a week ago,
No sound track, no credits, just two pelvises
In sync and lipstick the color of these tulips
Still fresh this Thursday morning of my afterlife.