American Lotus

The child sits on the flower with his mother,
finger in his mouth,
suspended in quiet water, insistent
water where there never should have been a city,
a lotus pillar,
a crown, city underwater,
dim.

The flower anchors underwater
with a root as big as the mother’s arm
and so the child becomes a god, his eyes
the flowers, the right
the sun, the left removed,
replaced with the moon,
something dimmer.

The mother anchors the child to the ground
underwater, a continent
the largest flower
and all its names, water chinquapin,
yancopin.
The water, bear oil, moves slow
where the city never should have been,

now a bend, a field, floodplain again,
incandescent,
the flowers with more than twenty petals.
She grinds their seeds to flour.
The child, his finger in his mouth, sits
with his mother, all eyes from ground to flower
where a city ends.