California poppy

The hinge of my tongue swings softly
with the gentlest alarm of love
whispered in your ear,
an unfolded word-flower
to press in the book of your memory,
and my hands open to show you a blossom
brought to you from ten thousand miles away:
a California Poppy.

Whence this yellow? The bright high pass
of Tehachapi, whose rim and spout
spill wind out upon the wind-dry desert,
was where the eye sought and paused and found,
where the hand caught from the ground, the bloom
that finally testified to my thoughts of you
so far away in grey rain-stricken Glasgow. But

the distance this yellow has travelled to see you
is greater than my meagre effort, that rips the air apart
in flight, wrenches the marrow from the bones of the earth,
drinks the sap stored in its ancient strata in heaving gulps
to propel me to you in some disposable contrivance of travel,
and merely destroys the world, to deliver my love. Beyond

the time to refine and distil this allele, the onslaught
and carnage of generations in which the ranks and rows
advanced and strove and all that grew then died
so that this yellow stain might prevail to be the dye
which my plea of love to you wears tonight, beneath
my hand which took the flower, there lies a larger gift.

The world is lop-sided. Symmetry would inject omniscience
that would obliterate us. Better to wonder if the blemish
is ours or the mirror's, and survive, than perish
in the finality of instant and complete knowledge.
The ultimate scrutiny reveals this primordial deceit
that made Sakharov smile: to remain, the vacuum splits
in a fission of finitude that borrows from the future
but doesn't give it all back, and in the imbalance
there exist the atoms that throb with every colour,
and when I give this yellow flower to you I give
my world entire, and in the unwitting witness of your smile
I see the world behold its own beauty.