“Because the world’s a lonely place sometimes,” he says

then remembers the last bunch of blooms

he gave to a woman (not a fairy princess)—

in Oxford, place of old stone and high poetry

that still holds half his brain

and part of his heart.  “This is not

about true love or loneliness and it’s not

about post modern irony, it’s about

the way I play the fool, the writing fool over

and over again in each new time and place,” 

he thinks; “It’s about the way the flowers 

are so beautiful, bursting

inside a floodlit cage of green mesh.”

He staggers under the weight of so much beauty.

He tries desperately to write

something beautiful, but can only scrawl words

and draw onto his page the lonely M of the Metro sign

as it floats on its pedestal, ghostly capital letter, tyrant

of symbols.  “And this is not about the way

I can never describe to you how these flowers look

bunched together in a closed stand—muted

in a cage of mesh that’s fastened with a Master Lock.”

He weeps that the world could hold so much beauty.

As he sits by himself on the arched concrete porch

of the train station he thinks of how he’d like to write 

great, sweeping lines about these flowers

that would leave the critics smacking their lips

and satisfied like connoisseurs at a wine tasting

congratulating themselves on finding the fruity hints

in the 1996 Chardonnay and wasn’t the ’83 crop

such a good one, but all he can bring onto the page

is this undisciplined scrawl that comes in short bursts,

in bursts across the page like the staccato wire bars

of the green mesh cage that hold in and elevate

so much beauty.  “If this cannot be poetry then I will die

a useless writer,” he says out loud. “But still, I cry out

this cold and broken praise until I fade, then fall, life

like the quick glory of these flowers.”

His mouth bleeds from the blow of so much beauty.

At the party earlier that night he served white wine

and a dry vodka martini to a retired Air Force major

who spoke in a throat cancer vibrato so low

he had to bend to hear. The major looked happy to be alive

as, ham-fisted and slow, he shuffled along, the two glasses—

one for himself, one for his wife—resting in trembling hands,

and the poet thinks of a character in the cartoon short

he’d just seen, an old man with leathery skin

who sat back with a sigh in his rocker

and, without speaking, glided peacefully into sleep.

He cannot wait to be old and silent.