Heads Wrapped in Flowers
By Thylias Moss
The Easter hats usually exploited gardens
and even when I took mine off, artificial bluebells
were braided into hair
just as they were (white lie)
when Deirdre's son dropped petals
into his mother's casket: one landed
as useless improvement of her mouth,
Years before, Deirdre and I ducked out of service
went to Little Italy's Murray Hill and slurped
things marinara with our decaf to support her crush
on Hill Street Blues' Ed Marinaro who played Coffey
who wasn't quite the palest thing in her life
considering what breathed down our necks
the most inhospitable air they had
but we anticipated bad breath,
we had assumed a garlicky existence
because miracles we then believed in made vampirism
just as plausible. No flowers on the checked-top table
wilted because of atmosphere. From a distance
the beret we saw on a stranger was telling us
walking wounded
and images from former Persian and Ottoman empires
say the same thing, distance failing to be what it was.
We learned Tigris and Euphrates
to help us learn the flowering of existence.
We learned fertile crescent
and we are somehow still amazed
by the fertility of experience: fully-swaddled
babies shaken like perverse maracas to silence
instead of make the music of rupture persistent:
light bulbs bandaged then fractured under wraps
and again and again those instruments
for crude concerts that parents applauded
with crackle that amplified the filaments' pitiful fizzle:
We didn't have to go much further to love Batman,
Spiderman, Zorro, the Lone Ranger, all masked men
illicitly patronizing convenience
stores
as I do for the implication that merchandise
has been skewed for the expediency of customers:
heads shrunken
and wrapped in price tags, Styrofoam, satin,
and certificates of authenticity. Real
old-school prissy passengers
in ling-finned convertibles wore nets on their heads
that when wind-whipped became fully bagged
as nets changed position, flimsy umpires appeared
stricken, the net a prototype of shrink-wrap
on these Sunday drives.
Copyright Credit: “Head Wrapped in Flowers” from Tokyo Butter by Thylias Moss. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books.