‘Mr. Dobson & the After-Life of Carnations’ by Wong May

Mr. Dobson & the After-Life of Carnations by Wong May

If there are secrets

A man can keep, apart from Death

He believes in them. From the florist’s dump

of rotting ferns & tall boxes marked “Holland”

He picked carnations, discreetly

Carnations

 

to undo

The wires, stem by stem, leaching

out the stopped blood the torsion

In sand; count 9 weeks

& they open discreetly

Cogwheels catching cogwheels

As in a clocksmith’s dream of heaven

so many military decorations!

… Unwound, they must take up all time,

From the park-attendant’s wheelbarrow

there are spares, strays, seconds

Lobelia, alyssum, snapdragon

& the gross tobacco plant

That holds its breath all day

To breathe at night

Like a perfume factory in Spain.

Another gift from the public garden,

Transplanted it wafts upstairs

Summer nights meaning you do the same.

Isn’t holding your breath

a feat like happiness?

At length you see little stars, little fishes.

“If it grows”, he said

“It is a cutting.”

He kept 2 families & lived to the end

in a basement with a woman

Who received the families

At church that day

Like one in the safe-keeping of a trance.

& she was unharmed.

Nor is the garden rolled up after him like a rug,

pansies fade in & out,

Making cat- faces,

such dazed looks

 

Human, we must love

till we die.

A garden of the held-breath then

one draws a long last, count ten

it spans like a rainbow

The negative of some paragraph

The flowers each in a different shade of dark —

He believes in them.

---

Picasso’s Tears by Wong May is now available from Octopus Books.