drowning in flowers

There was love, of course. Mostly boys:
a flat-faced engineering student from Missouri,
a Texan flaunting his teaspoon of Cherokee blood.
I waited for afterwards—their pale eyelids, foreheads
thrown back so the rapture could evaporate.
I don’t believe I was suffering. I was curious, mainly:
How would each one smell, how many ways could he do it?
I was drowning in flowers.

—Rita Dove, Mother Love