Basket of Flowers

— Where are we with flowers these days? They’ll never stop blooming. Rilke wrote 24 poems on the rose. The flowers continue to dream us even when their beauty is too delicate for us in this ravaged world. Sometimes flowers come with cigarettes. The poets will not be done with flowers. Nor the painters. They’ll show how ugly they are, too, in the poems these days. The way they decay or how they look when they’ve fallen to the pavement and been trodden upon over and over. — The flowers in poems will be exhausted or fresh or touched by frost or black or alone or a burden or growing out of the rock or by the sea or always inexplicable. The flower will be changing and dimming and filled with light and drooping and hoping and dying and living and careening and floating and falling. The flowers will always persist. The flowers will appear aimless, but they know how to follow the sun. The flowers will be tattered and sweet-scented and mysterious and deep. The flowers are bruised and torn and…