It’s not the spadix’s perfect candling, lepered
with pollen.
It’s not the dark-red pistils shrapneled
in the flower’s fluted bell, the bright chestnut blush
of inflorescence bandaging its spathe.

It’s the promise of death, the carrion-rot effluvium
of its flowering, its rare cologne

that attracts me to the garden’s hothouse,
just hours away from bloom.

This is how God perfumes
the dead: burnt sugarcane candied in stalks,
stinkhorns blistering compost, earthstars
veined by wood rot.

I want to say desert, the abandoned place, and be there
again,
lifting the long bone of the soldier
from the muddy sockets his limbs punched into the Tigris’
bank, scrub away the sand fleas

feathering his eyes. I want to say his body
was pollen, lifted grain by grain above Baghdad
on the flesh flies’ stained-glass wings.

I want to say, yes, at nineteen I would have blacked
his eyes again with my buttstock and kissed

a brass slug into his windpipe. But I’m here
now in the garden’s vertebrae rows

the botanist saying Arum—arrow-shaped
leaves, she knowing nothing of arrows, how heaven
gathers at the flint’s tip. She’s waited a thousand days
for three.

She says corpse: the flower
made flesh, empurpled, rose madder, and marbled rigging
split into a continuous fan, putrid.
I have seen flies
enter the hive of a dead soldier’s mouth and honeycomb
his tongue like a thick inch of fallen fruit.