Flower Conroy
Elegy of the Tigerwolf
Yours is an afterlife of devil’s waltz strawberries. I meant no trespass. Close your mouth, open your eyes. The negative meaning being: throat of howl & electricity behind the blindness. A mock sun, a lost cloud. Babbling wildflowers impale themselves upon their stalks, frothing bubbles. I screamed ferns. From age of moonset, until around 5:15—when dawn’s first streaks appear in the east—the sky will be moodring & darkle. Silence is the combination of all colors. It is written: I am Made perfect thru the blood…I cover my doorpost & possessions with the blood… & Let me Speak the mystery… But what is mystery & what is blood. Angel wings & daisies sprout in the vacancies your footprints have left. In you is all of heaven. When you appeared after such absence—phantasmagoria, shadows within shadows—a vision I could not reckon. What but illusion is heaven? Meaning, here’s some jam for your bread—& a smattering of honeybutter.
Orangutan (also spelled orang-utan, orangutang, or orang-utang) Elegy
Sun drains. Your name translates: Forest People. Mine, into girl. Bad luck to look you in your face as you sit gazing for hours. Voyeur God created universe, forsakes it thereafter: deism. If you swallow a rock: monsoon rains. If you swallow a stone: geophagy. The laws of physics speak the binding equations. You ‘blaze’ in light, disappear virtually into shadow. Something about your bright pongo hair. You’re like me—solitary. Large leaf umbrella, broken. Promise: with body entire, nature reclaims as its own what we abandon.
Elegy of the Cricket
God saved the queen but gulls saved the crops—from our restless leg syndrome, our cutlery artillery, we whom descended apocalyptic upon the grain. Foretelling a stranger’s approach with our quietness, or tweedling impending rain. Confined in captivity—we make lucky pets. Children of violin & flower, we spring winged—slick & whistling—then chew your stockings ‘to socks. Peanuts, young roots, the blighted pumpkins—what don’t we crave? What an octave one strings of letting go—perched on a rock plucking insatiable, songs from a harp. While one gone mad with the faint scent of sugar loosens soil with its face—carries the earth away on his back, grain by grain—like Atlantis! Sound rising—as of a train speeding through moonlight. Unleashed, clumsiest of the clumsy, in our royal furies we devour everything. Even each other.
Snail Mourning
You hide inside yourself. I’m not the one who’s afraid to be touched. Crafted of tongue & mica, flesh you call home. A cave’s the whole hole of itself, a trumpet or tuba’s mouth, its soundmoon. I familiarize myself with being alone. Without feeling—you glide along the edge of a razor. Of all flora to conjure Aphrodite: tuberose, with its scent of skin under the veil—from a vast distance you smell her, detect her from among the thistle—a patch of perfume not your own on the collarbone. You circle, slow irregular stroll—a radius the length a cricket’s pitch. Body, a gill in the garden unflinching—how naked, how exposed you are—a lung of night sails—without your shell.