Poppies

I am small among fields of red flowers. They look toward me and watch as time presses its skeletal fingers into my limbs. Yes, this is my body now: a startling mosaic of death-colored discoloration. Thumbprints corrode me like an oil spill, such unglamorous stains. I am other, not red—still alone, even among these populous blossoms. They waver in front of my eyes and sway like ghosts unafraid even of death, haunting me, taunting me, courageous though they are the picture of transience. Life for them is set in stone as summer (arcing upward from the spring only to flatline in the fall), but mine is a winter, refusing to betray its ambiguous end. It begins to click for me, why I am lost among them. The agony of “other” almost brands my throat closed—almost. You are not them, it yells; yet with my blue-black arms outstretched I waver too. It is I, I call out. In graceful parentheses—it is I, (the scared one). But for all my courage, they cannot answer: dying keeps them on a tight schedule, and the sun is setting sooner and sooner now. I learn firsthand that autumn is a study in endings of all different shapes in sizes. Flowers, for instance, have their brains blown out, losing blood in scarlet succession; like soldiers, they wear annihilation as a badge. Mine is different—slower, protracted. I have to wait; it does not come on cue although these bruises are expensive too. I pay for them just under the surface, in currency death takes time to exchange.