You will not dry me
The gladiolus in his drooped decay
Sinewy bend for upside-down blooms like the wishbone of gardens.
Severed ends,
Rootless, he slurps
In silent desperation
As only a leaf’s width away
In her pinstriped suit, calathea in salutation greets the sun
Perhaps punishment for poison, yet pothos tangles in be-speckled growth while rubber fans in red-tipped reach, its snowy sap enough to kill. More painful than punishment for crime is punishment for nothing at all
And so gladiolus falls lower in ever wilting dejectionHis blooms a final plea for life as though through grasping hands were he to have limbs, clutch at that which evades him in the milkiness of water
Bluntness of stumps, his xylem and phloem no longer able to sustain the beauty that was his life. Leaning on that which imprisons him, the crystal supports the spectacle made of his final days. His dying a thing of beauty. Folding unto himself, his cormous ways prevent the slow fluttering of doomed petals in depression fall. From water he came and into the moistness of his inner self he returns until all is mush and never was a flower.
Unwilling to be displayed in dying, his final act to prevent exhibition in death. As though to say, You will not dry me.
©2018 Clementine Yost
June 23, 2018
