Why I Just Dropped the Nature Bouquet

Like a cocoon full of its writhing moth, at the park’s edge, lying beneath a tree a couple struggles almost secretly within the thin white sheet they have brought. Daylight still and nearly home from my walk around this summer-baked Lubbock lake bubbling with methane gas or maybe catfish gasps, I am close enough to see she is on top. In the fingers of one hand I hold what I’ve found: a dove feather, several sprigs of curly willow. And a butterfly wing. Nothing in the other. She must think me strange. She sees I see. Where are the police, neither of us will say. She softly sighs something to the man below, but he won’t look over. He is hardly there, his eyes must be rolled back so far in his mind dissolving like pills. In assent, he only nods he mustn’t, for a moment, move or breathe. Silly me, I want to comfort her. I am close enough to tell that two wisps of her hair are falling spent over them like long dark tassels of a veil. We are all close to something here. For a moment, I roll my eyes upward like him, but not as deep into the sky. They are waiting for me to disappear. I am looking away, but I can’t look away. Who looks away at the end of the world?