After the box wine, the chicken thighs, and Nancy’s spice cake,
we lounged around talking of poetry, manure, and flowers.
The warm of summer lingered. And the smile of moonlight.
Mosquitoes were on vacation. “Look!” Sylvia, our host, cried.
On the half-dead night-blooming cereus, there was a large
pale flower opening. All of us pressed our noses toward its
sugary fragrance. Evidently, Johnny, a horticulturalist,
had given it to Beth, who passed it on to the warden’s wife,
and all of them are gone, so Sylvia adopted it. When she put it
on a stool in bright lamplight, it was difficult not to touch.
How idiotic our griefs seemed, how transient our sins.
In the same way I am rewired by mineral traces in seawater,
frivolous petals on a dry stem had given us our bodies back.
By dawn it had withered up and was gone.