Allegheny, Monongahela

Night-Blooming Cereus

42 Night-Blooming Cereus The eye’s endless interpolation— woodgrain, the scent of gasoline and dirt: the barn and your stumble through darkness’ thick drape. Blooms coalesce on a rogue edge of light. The flowers’ white mouths sighing open, cool tendrils heavy and curling with water. Whole imagined from fragment. The blindspot filled. I am moonlight full on theAgra Fort, hall swathed in creamy silks, plates bone white and filled with milk curry. Pale cardamom pods floating like stars in daylight. I will keep things from you. Three nights running we waited, our bodies 43 drifting over the shadow-washed lawn, interior light streaming through the slats of the barn, and nothing. Vines quiet and climbing the beams.Your voice asking questions, my answerless mouth. I am a white banquet: light complete as a blackout, the china seamless with food, with brocade. Morning finds a perfumed jellyfish colorless in a silver dish, wilted tendrils floating like wet ropes of hair. You knocked at the window to wake me. Your hands held a bowl of heavy blooms, translucence already edging the petals, and I saw you as you must have floated in the liquid weight of sleep: you smelled the wet perfume of blooming. You ran blind to the barn. 44 We could live like this. Put the kettle on, shine the silver white. Food reaches your mouth if you believe there is a spoon, if you imagine soup thick as water. Every sense fed except sight. ...