Merciless.
Downstairs
the night-blooming jasmine is flowering so hard I can hear it.
The scent has become a solid thing inhabiting the air
shouldering aside the dark oxygen of this night.
Thousands of tiny trumpets waxy white on one shadowy bush
herald this fragrance singlemindedly.
You would think their lives depended on this,
this yelling that they are doing, so silently.
The night-blooming jasmine
trails its thousand scented fingers
down my head.
I am
undone by something so good it hurts,
by a love song between a flower and a moth.
This night the seduced air
carries up memories
wrapped in the heedless ambition of flowers
who don’t care that it hurts to remember,
who can’t care,
who exist for the touch of the silver moth,
that will come if they work hard enough,
emitting.
It’s a gift they can’t stop themselves from giving, like a river.
They give like a river pouring upward.
What’s a little bit of human dying to a flower?
While my whole world is busy falling to its knees
a moth shakes free its wings, which gleam.
Ready,
and sure,
prepared to die for love.
