Orchids Of Decay

He named every creature he touched.

Knew which frog could sing underwater,

which bird forgot its way home,

which leaf healed quickest when torn.

A man of science.

Of order.

Of tenderness reserved

for everything that couldn’t answer back.

He spoke to orchids

the way he never spoke to me;

softly,

as if even his breath were benevolence.

He said plants were easier.

They didn’t bruise when disciplined.

And I believed him.

Because I was evidence

of what happened when something did.

He called it education.

I called it language.

He said it built character.

I said it broke sound.

Now his hands tremble not from anger,

but from age.

The zoologist reduced 

to the faint idea of a forgotten animal he once studied,

the body a slow extinction in progress.

He looks for pity in the eyes he once trained to flinch.

Finds only reflections.

I don't feed him soup.

Or, change his sheets.

Every now and then though, 

I document his decline with clinical precision.

A son of unsentimental biology,

unbothered by love, 

unweighted in duty bound guilt.

Upbringing was a myth that wilted a long time ago, 

somewhere between discipline and dinner.

He looks at my incapacity of empathy

and says, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

I say nothing.

He mistakes that for grief and repentance.

And yet, it is neither.

When he sleeps,

I water his orchids.

They come of age

without guilt,

without gratitude,

without grammar.

Like me.