Filed under: poems | Tags: death, flowers, ghosts, Kali, rebirth, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge
I’m in the habit
of killing things,
smashing small insects,
tugging at the stems of tulips
and tying flowers into my beloved’s dark hair.
If you cut off my head
I too will be a picked daisy
and Kali will wear the blossom of my face
like my beloved does
a daisy chain.
Sever my head from my neck
and I will be just as dead
as a Christmas tree
or a rose torn from the bush.
I have piled dead sentinels high
in my beloved’s vases
in this fashion,
and tucked them behind her ears
so that they could give their essences to her.
I’ve pulled them gasping from hot cars
and nicked them from neighbor’s gardens,
and studied their mortician’s poses
in florists’ shops.
I have seen them in great bundles
stacked stone-dead like Jews
and in bunches still in the dirt
in open-air nurseries
with little white plastic labels that have
exotic names on them like
helianthus annuus and
hyacinthus orientalis.
I have browsed for the right kind in catalogues,
each picture like
the posie-photos
that the Khmer Rouge took on the Killing Fields,
the posie-ghosts on paper
still alive then,
no more saying ‘pick me’ than
the lawyers, doctors and teachers
who died those years in
Cambodia;
but still I do,
when things are good or
when they go wrong;
and compare their
dying graces
to my beloved,
and present them to her
in order to brighten her day –
dozens of dead, sweet-smelling soldiers
draped in flags of cellophane.
I knew
when you sat down.
It’s strange to think it’s been a year
since I landed that first kiss,
and a year since you waltzed through my door
and confessed
you wanted me to be
your boyfriend.
My hands will remember
the soft, gentle curve of your hips
forever.
Since then I have lived
400 days
in your presence,
in tumult and in cheer.
In joyous days
which all blend together now
I have carried the torch of the day countless times
into night
while you have slept peacefully in my bed.
You have planted sweet kisses on my neck
that have yielded pale blossoms
dipped in black ink
which you have dried
and hung
on your walls.
In 400 days I have watched you create universes
with your paintbrush.
I knew
when you sat down
that things would never be the same again.
[Written on the inside of a copy of Sei Shonagon's 'Pillow Book,' given to a special someone on our anniversary. The passage from the book which gives this poem its title, 'In Spring it is the dawn,' can be read here: http://tanabata.blogspot.com/2006/04/in-spring-it-is-dawn.html]
