Flowers don’t lie, he tells me one morning
weaving his words carefully around the kernel.
My question ‘why flowers of all things’
doesn’t make a headway through the shell.
His hands were always mud, birthing buds
from all plants that flowered.
His doctrines germinated from little saplings
in big to medium to small earthen pots.
The blooms took all the gravity of his conclusions.
In the backdrop of his enlightenment
the plants, the rooted disciples were too discoursed
to shake a leaf to his sermons
and touching the gaze of a longing breeze, too much to ask.

I remember one face from my childhood,

he said, trimming off a bold shoot

a peeve among the crusties
an un-bastardized element among the alloys
took to flower love all of a sudden.
If he had looked into the mirror now and then
he would know there was sunshine beyond the baldachin
he would know the onset of his drift.

I touch the flower faces and wonder
how much of a lesson there is
to learn outside a flower life
how much of sunlight must have cheated him
and caressed the cheeks of his virgin blooms.
I follow him, studying the niches of bare feet on wet earth
some mornings are about understanding the totems.