Uplift

In the frozen wastes of bookish learning where snow-ploughs pile the daily drifts of stress in front of the student’s door and make him quite forget that he should be enjoying his paid prison of scholarly solitude, a delivery arrives. A long, narrow box with a florist’s seal. He knows what it is – he’s no idiot afterall – and delights. But then rechecks his name on the address label, just to be sure they are his. No one has had flowers delivered to him before.

They are indeed for him, and he immediately forgets all the articles he has been reading about poetry and instead, for a moment, lets his memory tumble through lines of floral images from the poems themselves. He forgets to even smell the flowers as he searches for a vase – so strong is the scent of synesthesia of the poems enscribed in his mind – but he doesn’t own a vase. No one has had flowers delivered to him before. So he puts them in his tallest beer glass. And (until the flowers wilt and die) drinks his beer from the bottle.