Though I marked my calendar, I’ll forget to watch
earth paint the moon gray, then black, then white again.

White as toothache, dry elbow skin, a crown of bones,
as, I imagine, a narwhal’s tusk, though I’ve never seen one.

Tonight I’d dip that tusk in my wine glass
to prevent all future hangovers, all future gloomy

moods where I pretend I’ll look up the etymology
of melancholia, but don’t. Where I pretend I need

a spouse to soothe me—but I don’t. Like—I won’t say
earth or moon—but like a shovel, I’m purposeful

but often idle. Collecting cobwebs is a passing,
though fulfilling hobby. Someday I hope to be less

shovel, more soil. Prepped for roots, for thriving—
Love, I want to say (to whom, I’m not sure),

I’ve come to a different power tonight.
This is the self stripped of alimonies, stripped of pearls.

Unforgiveable, unrelenting, cherished by no one—
not you, wife, nor you, husband. Not even you

dear moon, whom I want to see cloaked
but won’t. Clouds tonight. Bats beading them.

At least, I think so. Maybe smaller darknesses
are just that—smaller, and thus, personable.

We did not say much to each other but
we grinned,
            because this love was so good you sucked the
rib bones

and I licked my fingers like a cat.
Now I’m
            omniscient. I’m going to skip past
the hard

parts that go on for a very long time. Here’s the
future:
            I laugh, because the pleasure was earned
yet vouchsafed,

and I made room for what was dead past and what
yet didn’t
            exist. I was not always kind, but I
was clear.

If you often find yourself at a loss for words
or don’t know what to say to those you love,
just extract poetry out of poverty, this dystopia
                            of civilization rendered fragrant,
             blossoming onto star-blue fields of loosestrife,
heady spools of spike lavender, of edible clover
                            beckoning to say without bruising
a jot of dog’s tooth violet, a nib of larkspur notes,
                        or the day’s perfumed reports of indigo
                                in the gloaming—
              what to say to those
                           whom you love in this world?
Use floriography, or as the flower-sellers put it,
Say it with flowers.
—Indigo, larkspur, star-blue, my dear.