Watermelon Snow

by Adrienne Pilon
 
Here are blooms, a cake frosting-pink spray of flowers
on a spring day, clustering over meadows of white.
Not an alpine meadow, and not flowers at all. Come closer,
 
and the icing pink goes steak red, the way blood runs
from raw meat sitting on a white plate, stabbed by
a sharp knife. How a bloody wound fans liquid out
 
on cotton bandages, or here, on snow, spot by spreading
spot. This is a glacier river run red: glacier blood, blood snow,
the color of defenseless ice, melting, giving up its buried
 
poisons. The sun so hot now, clotting out the cold,
breaking the whiteness of ice, shining for days without
cease, this shivering heat making red blooms out of hidden green.
 
Watermelon Snow, the words conjuring sweet, a summer confection.
A flowery appellation: chlamydomonas nivalis. The earth bleeds,
and we make beautiful names from our wretched failings.