Essential Heirlooms

Downtown is studded with suppliers

All day they replicate, twins then triplets

Becoming a nervous number, all silver steel

Hazy orange on the street

Between each entry

Midtown is raised up in brown brick

Showroom novelties are a sedative

Sheathed in a hundred warm lights

Dusky rubies and oddly smooth lemons

Possibilities rainbow out

Construction goes all Summer

On a Brooklyn street, there's a temporary rupture

The first delivery arrives

That crush of metal, now cool and obliging

It sprouts velvet, frail and fibrous life

The aching smell never leaves me (new suitors are under strict orders)

Every petal tricks my mind into glancing up

Ribbed red glass on a track (I was even handed a rubber stamp for those)

I hated flowers for years

Lurid Birds of Paradise ultimately summed up as soulless steel

New York is gray and brown, a little red

Hospital rooms are white

Here the term is ‘Back East’

Makes it hard to forget where you came from

Sun-bleached palm trees aren’t in the past yet

A bloom sets in and fans out

Roses have no peers, they gaze back at you

Lilies are bronze freckles and snow-lettuce hems

And match the shades of your insides

Everywhere all at once

First came paper, then came glass

Blowing dust away to reveal a celebration

Vessels into which Peridot stems sink down

Watching some greet the cosmos, others remain shuttered

They turn brown, sometimes red

It hurts less and less each time, even though I’ve grown to love them