Red Tulip

Before I could tell you
that my mother, yesterday,
had won a golf tournament,
you were on your way to the conference Downtown
on dismantling racism in medicine.

After you left,
I shut the door
and drank coffee in silence.
And spent an hour or more, wiping stains
the sun had left behind during yesterday's sunset.

Outside, clouds were weeping rain,
and winds were hissing at trees
coated with layers of Winter.

I noticed your ocean blue Littman stethoscope
laying down on the living room table,
its metallic ribs exposed to a napkin of darkness.
And I picked it up by its eartips and tapped
at the centers of the tunable diaphragms;
Anatomies,
that have amplified for you, sounds of life and death.  

After a while, when the rain had collapsed into a trickle,
And the sky was a shred of dysmorphic clouds,
I put the stethoscope on the chest of a red tulip
standing, coyly, on my living room table, with crinkled lips
and angina. And all I heard was Silence.
I shifted the chestpiece to the region near the stem 
to hear sounds of tulip roots dining on fractions of atmosphere,
but all I heard again was Silence.
Petals, once asthmatic,
had de-pigmented. Ovaries had miscarried.
The anthers and filaments had lost their pollen
to exoskeletons of air currents. And tears had crusted
along their sepals. What remained now was only a red shell,
with magenta stripes and rigor mortis.

On my notebook, I recorded
Time of death, 9 am, Saturday, March Twelfth.