Night Bloom

Caught in a net of vines
and long leaves leathery,
speckled with rot,

in places frayed, eroded,
eaten away to veins,
the veins to mesh--

improbably tonight,
before our eyes,
the bud splits,

petal peels off unruffling
from petal and whitely swells
and tips over

under the weight of opening.
Papery dragon mouth
whose fire is fragrance

so dense, so palpable
you almost see it, rare
fire of a father’s

love, of the little cutting
he gave you more than thirty
years ago,

and of the dying too
he fell in love with and
in secret wooed

and, vanishing, became.
You run the flashlight over
the fringed lip,

down the bright moist petals,
under the leaf it hangs from,
searching, hunting,

more rapt, it seems, than anguished,
as if the only question
you could ask

tonight is how? how
could he ever have wanted not
to see this,

not ever again to see, to
breathe in, this insistent
blazing open

of the gift he gave you
long ago? How
could you not tonight

imagine he didn’t know
there’d be no end for you
of longing for it,

looking at it, the beauty
always counted on
and unexpected,

fierce, and hardly any
trace of it in sight
come morning?

*Alan Shapiro, fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published eight books of poetry: Tantalus in Love (2005), Song and Dance (2002), The Dead Alive and Busy (2000), Selected Poems (2000), Mixed Company (1996), Covenant (1991), Happy Hour (1987), The Courtesy (1983), and After the Digging (1981). Shapiro is also the author of three books of prose: Vigil (1997), The Last Happy Occasion (1996), In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (1993). Poetry editor of the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press from 1994 to 2000, and co-editor of Greek Tragedy in New Translation at Oxford University Press, Shapiro published a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, and is currently at work on a verse translation of The Trojan Women by Euripides. Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a 1991 recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. The William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Shapiro has also taught in the MFA Creative Writing program at UNC, Greensboro, and at Northwestern University.