Francisco Márquez
The Botanical Gardens
I enter the row
of blossoming cherries
showered by petals,
remembering
the odd bouquets
my lover
gave me monthly
—tall-bearded irises,
ostrich ferns
and king proteas
bespeckled in cinquefoil
then wrapped
in burlap, and because
he worked with them,
I think to him they were
a language salvaged
from obsolescence,
though to us
they became mundane
as the Sundays
he called to catch up
with his mother, or familiar
as the names we called
each other: buttercup,
daisy, dumpling,
baby. Twenty five, I was
twenty five when a man
first gave me
a posy of flowers.
Has anyone
ever given my father
a flower? I exit,
the windflowers nod
their dark centers
like the faces of men.
Francisco Márquez reads “The Botanical Gardens”
Francisco Márquez is a Venezuelan poet with work in The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry series, and The Slowdown podcast. The recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Project and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he lives in Brooklyn.