after Margaret Preston’s Waterlilies (1921), oil on cardboard, Castlemaine Art Museum, Sybil Craig Bequest, 1990

This one’s not about throwing cake at Thea.
Or even balancing mindfully what grows out of mud.
Hint of gold on lacquered river —
beauty with a dangerous edge?

You need to imagine downstream in time.

The sturdy stem of a cut-glass 
	[thingy] outside the frame.
Not the hyper-object of climate change, but still.
How is water more transparent than?

Three lotus lookalikes floating in solar darkness.
No chronos, post-human. No despair, either.

After the collapse of everything, 
after entropy has coated the tongue,
the post-natural might just surrender to

three referential petals in asymmetrical
night-scented geranium: motile
cadmium outside the bowl.