Heads Wrapped in Flowers
 

The Easter hats usually exploited gardens
and even when I took mine off, artificial bluebells
were braided into my hair.
 
Deirdre’s son dropped petals into his mother’s casket,
one landed like a useless improvement of her mouth.
 

Years before, Deirdre and I ducked out of service,
went to Little Italy’s Murray Hill and slurped
things marinara with our decaf to support her crush
on Hill Street Blues Ed Marinaro who played Coffey
 
 who wasn’t quite the palest thing in her life,
 a few of them were breathing down our necks
 the most inhospitable air they had
 
 but we had anticipated bad breath,
 we had assumed a garlicky existence
 
because the miracles we believed in made vampirism
just as plausible.  No flowers on the checked-top table
 
wilted because of atmosphere.  From a distance
the beret we saw on a stranger was telling us
walking wounded
 
and images from former Persian and Ottoman empires
say the same thing, distance failing to be what it was.
 
We learned Tigris and Euphrates
to help us learn the flowering of existence.
 
We learned fertile crescent
and we are still amazed
 
by the fertility of experience, fully-swaddled
babies shaken like perverse maracas, to silence
 
instead of make the music of rupture, 
the light bulbs bandaged then fractured
under wraps into instruments for crude concerts 
 
that parents applauded.
 

We didn’t have to go much further to love Batman,
Spiderman, Zorro, the Lone Ranger, all masked men
illicitly patronizing convenience
 
stores
 
as I do for the implication that merchandise 
has been skewed for the expediency of customers,
 
heads shrunken 
 
and wrapped  in price tags, Styrofoam, satin
and certificates of authenticity.  Real 
 
 
 
old-school prissy passengers 
 
in long-finned convertibles wore nets on their heads
that when wind-whipped became fully bagged
 
as nets changed position, flimsy umpires appeared
stricken, the net a prototype of shrink-wrap, 
 
on these Sunday drives.
 

*From the upcoming collection Tokyo Butter (Persea, 2005).