So Much Hadn’t Happened Yet

My first office was a tiny adjunct to a former vault,
the great iron wheel still on the door. I brought
an obsession for arranging words and a framed print
of the revolutionary, iconic, unsentimental, tender 
Cunningham photograph — Magnolia Blossom.  
“Don’t you think it’s suggestive?” my supervisor asked. 
The layered gleam and shadow of petals, tilted
toward viewers, completely filled the frame,
and the stamen in the center offered pollen 
with a polysemous elegance. To see the flower 
so intently you’d have to go close, to choose to be
surrounded by a flock of flowers — some, like this one, 
poised and opened, others tightly furled,
lightly rouged, buds, waiting, while early falling
petals encircle the tree. “Yes,” I said.

ξ

Pam Matz received an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and later studied with Lucie Brock-Broido and Henri Cole. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Memorious, Bloodroot, Painted Bride Quarterly, Quartet, Nixes Mate, and Lily Poetry Review. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.