She used to make him eggs with flowers.
Wild white bulbs, pearl & ivory blossoms,
beetle and night’s moth-mated buds
that opened in the quick exchange of liquid
yolk for omelet. Now when he hears her name
he thinks of creamy flower buds unfolding
sour & reluctant among fiddleheads or flame
softening into fragrant oily slips
tangy secret papers, fortunes. And knows
for this one memory there are a thousand
others, moments never savored, eaten by time,
moments deflowered, bolted, lost & squandered
now faint as a spent field, memory of dark
canopy, cryptic as the alphabet of wasps.