Rikki Santer

Sway of Perennial
for T.M. Glass and her still life series, The Audible Language of Flowers

            “To create a little flower is the labor of ages.”  William Blake

For some it’s cars with numbers or football stats, but for me it’s
the precision of what a naked table can launch with its puppetry
in eye lock.  Your bouquets rhapsodize, hum into a sea of black velvet
as if poised on Pound’s wet, black bough. Each antique
vase a proud mystic that summons blossoms teeming for my honeyed
hunger—all perfect pitch served lush. What could your flower
anthologies be dreaming—azaleas, tulips, narcissus, bleeding hearts—
cut at their freshest, defying gravity, arranged into a superlative world? 
Do they return to the brothel of a Queen Mother’s pleasure garden, coy
for sex as they part their floral skirts? Do they savor the fractal surprise
of digital cultivation, botanical theatrics of trompe l’oeil, eternal lives
folded into golden mean?  So here I am, dreaming too, of my mother’s
rubber birds of paradise in the foyer’s planter, dust coating their silence
but not the drama of her entryway and the wingbeats of orchids
harmonizing atop the rim of her bathtub, the only room where east-facing
sunlight was best. For my wedding day she called every florist in town
for me to carry calla lilies like a tender baby, a bouquet she had wanted
for her own day in her mother’s crowded living room—no such flowers
yet lustre from her navy shirtwaist satin dress with rhinestone buttons,
now wrapped and resting in my cedar closet.  Today morning arrives
outside my bedroom window and I imagine tiny feet of black ants following
pheromone trails to tickle peony buds for unlocking a profusion of fuchsia—
my mother’s delicate pets that I transplanted from her long-ago garden. 
Calculus of still life—never silent, never still.