31: Blooming Cross

Their heads burst slowly, without sound or parade;

each swift color composed by gifted senses.

Immaculate conception lives daily,

seasonally within the marriage

of world and sight. Listen to flowers. In sound,

and hearing, the clear space between growth and bloom.

Can you hear a door open,

colors knocking, the bloom ajar, the coming in

introduction of the palate?

Is their sound so lost in the room, their arrival so unimportant;

where they are from, who they are, how far they have traveled:

these are the questions

of guests. May you wash their roots, take their pollen?

Flowers are passengers.

The train circles the tracks.

Why prod seed and leave it on the platform?

Here come the cells of the body, opening, blooming;

married out each day to senses.

Better they not undertake the journey, never express their perfume,

return their gift intact, unadulterated. No misuse, or wasted earth this way.

Save them from the unforgiving, distracted nostrils' snatch of air.

Why should any life come to be ignored?

A soul climbs from the bloom and holds in the air, wraps around my mind:

knocking, honey and tangerine, red lemon, soft berry, hibiscus, suckle, rose,

every kind of ground, brown, green, moist warmth.

When the family arrives, even split and one by one they knock,

with the hand - a curled petal. Receive them, easy loving,

colorful and scented,

subject to tear,

blossoming,

spreading,

ripped from the ground and submerged in a message:

take me; I am the one. My palm fully expressed, nailed open into wood.

Hear that dry hammer stroke rise