A Language So Old

These hands have been fists all day.
Clenched around the pallet jack, the edge
of a box that weighed what a small child weighs,
and then another, and another,
until the hands forgot the difference,
and now in the dark they open on their own
the way certain flowers open -
the fingers uncurling one by one
as if remembering a shape
they held before they learned to grip.

Somewhere south of here a white bloom
splits the dark the way a whisper
splits a room that thought it was empty.
They call it the flower from heaven.
They also call it a flash in the pan.
I can't say it right. I've tried.
It unfolds for a few hours
in heat I have never stood in,
and by morning it has folded back
into the stem. It dies
at the moment of severing.
You cannot carry it home.

There is a blue flower growing
through the gravel by the loading dock
at the distribution center on Surrett Drive.
I know because I saw it Wednesday
on my last fifteen, leaning on the fence
from the other side, the chain-link
pressing its grid into my shoulder blade
the way a net holds the shape
of what it catches. The flower
grows between the dumpster and the runoff ditch
where the butt-ends collect
in their own small cemetery.
It grows inside a veil of its own making -
thin green threads the bloom
must push through to be seen at all,
so that looking at it
is like hearing someone say I love you
through a closing door.
They named it Love-in-a-Mist.
They named it Devil-in-the-Bush.
They named it for Damascus.
Its seeds are black and bitter.
They used to grind them into pepper
to make the pepper go further.
A woman I don't know
stood on her side of the fence,
wrist brace velcroed tight,
leaning until the chain-link
swayed toward the Nigella
and her breath - it was cold enough
to see her breath, even in May,
the way 3 a.m. is always colder
than it has any right to be - her breath
moved through the fence
and the flower's own mist of leaves
trembled in the displaced air
the way water trembles
when something almost touches it.

I don't know what she saw.
Her face was none of my business.

But I kept thinking about it on the drive home.
Not the flower. Her. The way she stood there
like she wasn't waiting for anything
to get better. Like that was the whole thing -
the blue and the cold and the not-waiting.
I keep thinking I should have said something.
I keep thinking the not-saying was the thing
I actually said.

I drove home. Let myself in.
The kitchen light at 4 a.m.
I ate a fig. The ordinary kind,
from the plastic clamshell at the grocery store,
the label half in something I want to call Portuguese.
Split it open with my thumbs,
these same stupid thumbs
that couldn't get the shrink wrap right
at the start of shift, the skin
giving easily, the interior
purple-dark and seeded,
sweet already tipping toward ferment,
that edge where the sugar
starts to give up on itself.
There is a flower inside a fig.
You have never seen it. No one has.
It blooms in the inverted dark,
petals facing inward, the whole life
accomplished without light,
without witness, and a wasp
no bigger than a breath
finds its way in
through an opening almost too small to exist,
navigating by scent alone,
by a language so old
it has no word for lost.
Someone once said burn the fig
beside the teak, the sala, the mango.
Show me the difference in the flame.
The seeds are still in my teeth.