Sunday, August 14, 2016

On Flowers. On Negative Evolution by Alan Dugan


On Flowers. On Negative Evolution

When the front-end loader ran over my wife’s Montauk daisies
I wanted to tell the driver, Butch—a nice kid—but couldn’t:
“No flowers, no us. Flowers are basic to human life.
That’s why we think they’re beautiful. No flowers, no seeds;
no seeds, no greenery; no greenery, no oxygen: we
couldn’t even breathe without them. Also: no greens,
no grasses; no grasses, no herbivorous animals;
no animals, no beefsteaks. There wouldn’t be anything
to eat except fish, and no way to breathe unless
we went back to the ocean and redeveloped gills.
There the seaweeds would make oxygen by flowering underwater,
the way it used to be in the old days, and you
would be running over them in your submarine. This is why
flowers are thought beautiful, and this is why it’s important
not to destroy too many of them carelessly, and why you could
have been more careful with my wife’s god-damned daisies.”



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