Peonies

You raise your hand to cut open cold blankets turning to tablecloths,

as the sun sets the table with your pink bowls and green handles.

I pull up my chair and eat from your folds, you are made to heal,

Paeon, student of medicine, practicing from pages of flowers.

“You can trust a book that blooms,” I imagine you’d say,

atop this dinner table hill, if you shrunk to fit into words.

Tell me in your opening, how to escape from

the glass museum walls of my observations.

If the flower therefore is, without thinking, 

then, I think, therefore am - one removed.