The Bud Is Not on the Sheet

The best inch is the left hand. The knuckles tense where the plastic resists, the soil stays under the nails, and vermilion is spent exactly once, on the valve, which is how a colour keeps authority. The roots bend around the pipe instead of passing through it; that is looking, not reciting. The two staples hold the arc down like facts.

Now the audit. The statement promises three stages of the bindweed runner: closed bud, open flower, drying capsule. The sheet gives two boxes, flower and capsule. The kneeling worker stands. A sheet built to distrust revelation when somebody else has dug the trench should survive its own trench-digging. At ten paces this is a gray arc and a brown hand; the argument begins at arm's length. That is a choice, not a failure, but it makes this a reading-table sheet, not Commons-wall material yet.

Where is the bud?