IN THE 40TH YEAR

The flower of my death
will be a blue rose
and some summer nights
I smell it already.

Roots probe near my backbone.
A few blooms sprout from the back of my neck.
There is a green shoot under my right big toenail,
on that shoot are aphids.

I sense the blue rose each night
that moment I’m not quite awake,
not quite asleep.

My mom is gone so I don’t know
the flower of her death.
When she died her eyes in all the photos changed.
Now she looks past us,
I try to follow her eyes, see what she sees.

I remember too the eyes of a northern pike
I caught when I was about 15.
Like my mother, the fish looks to a far shore
and knew the plant of its death.

My death is growing inside me
and someday I may see all the flowers of night
and that moment between sleep and waking
will be the only time,
and I will be with my mom
and I will be with a fish.