Li-Young Lee - Secret Life lyrics

Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake, a boy growing old at the dining room table, pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books the flowers he picked all morning in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus, azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris; reading in another book their names he knows, and then the names from their secret lives; lives alchemical, nautical, genital; names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script; secrets botanical description could never trace: accessory to empire, party to delusions of an afterlife, kin to the toothed, mouthed, furred, horned, brained. Flowers seem to a boy, who doesn't know better, like the winged, the walking, the swimming and crawling things abstracted from time, and stilled by inward gazing. Copying their pictures, replete with diagrams, he finds in the words for their parts, the accounts of their histories, and their scattered pollen, something to do with his own fate and the perfection of all dying things. And when it's time, he discovers in the kitchen the note left for him that says his parents have gone and will return by noon. And when it's time, the dove calls from its hiding place and leaves the morning greener and the one who hears the dove more alone.