in our despair we have made
a flowerless earth
—Inger Christensen, Alphabet
There used to be bees.
There used to be a name for those who tended them,
a word for the fear of them, a set of instructions
for how to smoke them out from beneath our eaves.
Now no flowers, no bees.
Now we have a thousand words for the word “green.”
We have filed our eyes to more sharply read the dictionaries
of the field, the shallow sea, the fleets of insectivorous birds
who burn our eyes with the breeze of their chlorine-scented wings.
Now there are more and more carnivores. All night we hear
monkeys eating each other loudly in the fruitless trees.
There is sad green and there is scared green and a green
for dread and one for when we can’t get out of bed
in the afternoon. We used to feel nostalgic at the smell
of cut grass, but now the sweet half is gone. Now we feel lonely
and panicked as sirens when we pass a fresh lawn.
Something is being rewound. The wind makes a wobbling sound
as it spirals through the glades of cycads.
Some people still make silk flowers, offensively soft and flawless,
expensively odorless. The rest of us bring pots of waterworts
and mosses to the funerals, clasp savage bunches of horsetails.
We grow unruly beneath the shadows of four-story ferns.
Monkey fur clogs our gutters. Monkey blood sometimes mists
through our screens to speckle our botany books,
propped open so we can imagine the smell of jasmine, lilac.
Somewhere, a clock is ticking. Blame spreads like a bog,
acidic and endless. Someone has deleted one hundred million
years of flowers, has cut the brakes.
One of us has pulled the pins out of the grenades,
the only flower we can still name.
This poem is available in Meltwater, which will be published by Milkweed in March 2023.
