Secret Life

Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake,

a boy growing old at the dining room table,

pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books

the flowers he picked all morning

in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus,

azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;

reading in another book their names he knows,

and then the names from their secret lives;

lives alchemical, nautical, genital;

names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;

secrets botanical

description could never trace:

accessory to empire, party to delusions of an afterlife,

kin to the toothed, mouthed, furred,

horned, brained. Flowers

seem to a boy, who doesn't know better, like the winged,

the walking, the swimming and crawling things abstracted

from time, and stilled by inward gazing.

Copying their pictures, replete with diagrams, he finds

in the words for their parts,

the accounts of their histories,

and their scattered pollen,

something to do with his own fate

and the perfection of all dying things.

And when it's time, he discovers in the kitchen

the note left for him that says

his parents have gone and will return by noon.

And when it's time, the dove

calls from its hiding place

and leaves the morning greener

and the one who hears the dove more alone.