Black Flowers

I have been to the prairie

have seen the twisted trees'

palsied branchings, downward-gropings

felt the savage sunshine snatch our shadows,

baking bald grounds cracked as ancient faces

seen sweet purple cornflowers peek

from gramma grass and sagebrush

trod timorously around ubiquitous prickly pear,

and in the fields both far and near

seen black flowers on pale white stalks

you said were actually yellow yucca corpses

but which, to me, were perfect tulips,

dark as sin, and as enchanting.

I've seen the fields' long faces yawning

under a joyless infinite sky

the once-fecund fruit trees

with their puny inedible offerings

and feltl other spoilings, like that

inside of you, a shattering

like the crumbling buildings' windows

broken like fragile promises

buildings jammed with corrosion

just like, again, yourself, but for

traipsing me through thirsty fields

laid bare, I thought, like naked women

waiting for lovers to shower them

with blooms of any color or blanket them

with killing quilts of snow.

The sad gazebo, its trellises

severed and blown, a few scraggly vines

adoring the stubborn frame -

I have seen all this with you

our eyes' admitting disparate ghosts

yet in many ways the same

our losses waking to greet us each dawn

before, even, a warm human hand.

I have seen land on land in the bleariness

of your once-clear eyes, in the hunching

of your shoulders beneath a tattered robe,

and even in, or especially in, the roughness

of your palms that caress in dark or light so unlike

the way the outdoors roughs us,

unlike the dust that fills us as we walk

the wind that whistles through our shells

whispering endless desolations we've been meted,

the ones we bear, and those we've left behind

and I have felt in your tremulous fingers

benedictions that move across my skin

like oceans lapping sparkling sand

and known the endless hunger of man,

and of one spectre so needing another

meshing into one and separating as one,

felt the ache of man for breasts like peaches

from a fertile orchard, or plums that blush

the female cheek, and satin hips like succulent pears

and above high winds, thought I heard you weep.

Yes, I have groped through high grasses

with you whose gay red hair now hangs

limp and gray, have stroked the dimples

that now crease your cheek, as you pass,

a phantom, by the dessicated creek

and through acres of gutted machines

abandoned rubbles of amputated limbs

have marched plain upon plain whipped

stoically by gusts in that terrifying terrain

and trembled before the staunch sundial

marking off our hours, as the tulips

blackly list beneath a heaven void

of rain or cloud, seen you stroll

the steppe like a shroud, and when

I am here and you are there,

recall our walking among the bones

of sheep lost to coyote, of coyote to thirst --

Yes, I am with you from here, and drum the days

until the fissures and the plains come to claim us

and we sprawl at last like huge black flowers

with parched and puckered lips

when winter its freezing manna frees

aching for springs we've lived to dream,

and dreamed to die, and died to see.

Julianza K. Shavin