Al Purdy is what Bukowski could have been if Bukowski was a genius and drank less.
In The Early Cretaceous
They came overnight
a hundred million years ago
the first flowers ever
a new thing under the sun
invented by plants
It must have been around 7 a.m
when a shrew-like mammal stumbled
out of its dark burrow
and peered nearsightedly
at the first flower with
an expression close to amazement
and decided it wasn't dangerous
In the first few centuries later
flowers began to cover the earth
in springtime they glowed
with gleaming iridescence
not just a tiny bouquet
like the colours on a mallard's neck
before mallards existed
or like god's earmuffs
before Genesis was written
and even tho nobody was there
to analyse it
they nevertheless produced a feeling
you could only share
like moonlight on running water
leaf-talk in the forest
the best things right under your nose
and belonging to everyone
And one of the early inhabitants
a comic-looking duck-billed dinosaur
might have lifted his head
with a mouth full of dripping herbage
and muttered Great Scott
or something like it
Triceratops gulped a township
of yellow blossoms
diplodocus sampled blue
for several horizons
and thought it was heavenly
and colour became food
It was not a motionless glory
for colours leaped off the earth
they glowed in the sky
when wind blew great yellow fields
danced undulating in sunlight
hundreds of miles of blue flowers
were dark velvet in starlight
and maybe some unnamed creature
stayed awake all night in the
midst of a thousand miles of colour
just to see what it felt like
to have all the blue-purple there was
explode in his brain
and alter both present and future
But no one will ever know
what it was like
the first time on primordial earth
when bees went mad with pollen fever
and seeds flew away from home
on little drifting white parachutes
without a word to their parents
-no one can ever know
even when someone is given
the gift of a single rose
and behind that one rose
are the ancestors of all roses
and all flowers and all the springtimes
for a hundred million years
of summer and for a moment
in her eyes an echo
of the first tenderness