Читать книгу Match - Helen Guri - Страница 14

Near the dissolving edge of the garden party,

a tulip dives up slowly

from below ground, against gravity.

It’s like a little-watched sporting event on rewind

at a bar no one goes to, those pink-tinged feet

a single bullet bound for heaven

while the whole remainder of the universe swims on,

undisturbed, in its habitual direction.

Now someone presses ‘pause.’

Stuck upside-down, a foot shy

of solid ground and wearing nothing

but the wind’s leotard,

the tulip must turn her feet into a head,

her mind into toes.

She begins by rooting her fingers

under the heavy metal cabinet of the earth.

Her torso is as spare as the twine between

two tin cans. Now the other end is talking,

or trying to. Listen, and you might barely hear

the arches of her feet

rehearse the embouchures of speech

surreptitiously to the air.

You are right to be suspicious.

By the time her eyesight rights itself,

she’ll be a periscope spying for the underground.

She’s building a subterranean fortress

lit by multiplying bulbs and

powered solely by the stationary cyclone

of her mental gymnastics.

The breeze is her own personal brand

of highly flammable hairspray.

She’s shrewdly packed her appetite

in one of those green tortoiseshell valises.

When the party goes shits-up, her getaway

car will come on tiptoe.