39 Flower poems

Along Ancona’s hills the shimmering heat, A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat Around the vines. The poppies lithe and fleet Seem running, fiery torchmen, to and fro To mark the shore. The farmer does not know That they are there. He walks with heavy feet, Counting the bread and wine by autumn’s gain, But I,—I smile to think that days remain Perhaps to me in which, though bread be sweet No more, and red wine warm my blood in vain, I shall be glad remembering how the fleet, Lithe poppies ran like torchmen with the wheat.

High on a bright and sunny bed A scarlet poppy grew And up it held its staring head, And thrust it full in view. Yet no attention did it win, By all these efforts made, And less unwelcome had it been In some retired shade. Although within its scarlet breast No sweet perfume was found, It seemed to think itself the best Of all the flowers round, From this I may a hint obtain And take great care indeed, Lest I appear as pert and vain As does this gaudy weed.

Lame again, I limp home along Lawn Terrace with a flowering sun star in a paper wrap then back to the village with a lame cat twisting and woeful in her cage. Bread these days isn't baked to last: how sad those posh loaves thudding off in pine breadbins all around the Heath: soulless latterday pets, frisky for a day or two, then binned or thrown to foxes, loaves just an inch of gloom below the caged birds you notice in corners of those same mansions when you seek the past, dinking their mirrors, dipping once in a while for a sip of milk.

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth. The hydrangea Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself. Pallid. Injured, wildly capable. A throat to come home to, tupelo. Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable. Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear. Wistful, woke most every afternoon In the green rooms of the Abandonarium. Beautiful cage, asylum in. Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not Have been there. So few wild raspberries, they were countable, Triaged out by hand. Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others, Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence. Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves Will (perhaps tomorrow) die. High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles, Scarlet fevers; Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home. Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths. Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence, In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such. Wisteria, extreme. There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

After the cling of roots and then the “pock” when they gave way the recoil up the hand was a small shock of emptiness beginning to expand. Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green and spiked. Like blissed-out childhood play turned mean they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway. It happens still. That desolating falling shudder inside and then our neighborhood seems only sprawling loops...like the patterns eaten on driftwood: even the home where I grew up (its smell of lingering wood-smoke and bacon grease) seems just a shell of lathe and paper. But this strange release follows: this tinge like silver and I feel the pull of dirt again, sense mist uncurling to reveal no architecture hidden behind the world except the stories that we make unfolding: as if our sole real power were the power of children holding this flower that is a weed that is a flower.

More than a hundred dollars of them. It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in. Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table— each fresh-faced, extending delicate leaves into the crush. Didn't I watch children shuffle strictly in line, cradle candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers, chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla's Easter? Wasn't I sad? Didn't I use to go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising bursting violet spears?—Look, the afternoon dies as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up their fluted throats until it fills the room and my lights have to be not switched on. And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet, so strong, that it could slice me open. It does. I know I'm not the only one whose life is a conditional clause hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room and the tremble of my phone. I'm not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind. When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for decades. God, I am so transparent. So light.

— for David Lehman Ten thousand saw I at a glance Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. —William Wordsworth Going to hell so many times tears it Which explains poetry. —Jack Spicer The day the war against Iraq begins I’m photographing the yellow daffodils With their outstretched arms and ruffled cups Blowing in the wind of Jesus Green Edging the lush grassy moving river Along with the swans and ducks Under a soft March Cambridge sky Embellishing the earth like a hand Starting to illustrate a children’s book Where people in light clothes come out To play, to frisk and run about With their lovers, friends, animals, and children As down every stony back road of history They’ve always done in the peaceful springs —Which in a sense is also hell because The daffodils do look as if they dance And make some of us in the park want to dance And breathe deeply and I know that Being able to eat and incorporate beauty like this I am privileged and by that token can Taste pain, roll it on my tongue, it’s good The cruel wars are good the stupidity is good, The primates hiding in their caves are very good, They do their best, which explains poetry. What explains poetry is that life is hard But better than the alternatives, The no and the nothing. Look at this light And color, a splash of brilliant yellow Punctuating an emerald text, white swans And mottled brown ducks floating quietly along Whole and alive, like an untorn language That lacks nothing, that excludes Nothing. Period. Don’t you think It is our business to defend it Even the day our masters start a war? To defend the day we see the daffodils?

Your pansies died again today. All June I’ve watched them scorch and fall by noon, their faces folding down to tissue-paper triangles. I bring them back with water, words, a pinch, but they are sick to death of resurrection. You planted them last fall, these “Chillers” guaranteed to come again in spring. They returned in April—you did not. You who said pick all you want, it just makes more! one day in 1963, and I, a daughter raised on love and miracles, believed it.

O zummer clote! when the brook’s a-glidèn So slow an’ smooth down his zedgy bed, Upon thy broad leaves so seäfe a-ridèn The water’s top wi’ thy yollow head, By alder sheädes, O, An’ bulrush beds, O, Thou then dost float, goolden zummer clote! The grey-bough’d withy’s a leänèn lowly Above the water thy leaves do hide; The bènden bulrush, a-swaÿèn slowly, Do skirt in zummer thy river’s zide; An’ perch in shoals, O, Do vill the holes, O, Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote! Oh! when thy brook-drinkèn flow’r’s a-blowèn, The burnèn zummer’s a-zettèn in; The time o’ greenness, the time o’ mowèn, When in the häy-vield, wi’ zunburnt skin, The vo’k do drink, O, Upon the brink, O, Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote! Wi’ eärms a-spreadèn, an’ cheäks a-blowèn, How proud wer I when I vu’st could swim Athirt the deep pleäce where thou bist growèn, Wi’ thy long more vrom the bottom dim; While cows, knee-high, O, In brook, wer nigh, O, Where thou dost float, goolden zummer clote! Ov all the brooks drough the meäds a-windèn, Ov all the meäds by a river’s brim, There’s nwone so feäir o’ my own heart’s vindèn As where the maïdens do zee thee zwim, An’ stan’ to teäke, O, Wi’ long-stemm’d reäke, O, Thy flow’r afloat, goolden zummer clote!

My ancestors weren’t hippies, cotton precluded fascination with flowers. I don’t remember communes, I remember ghettos. The riots were real, not products of hallucinogens. Free love had been at Redbones since black unemployment and credit saturation. The white women my mother cleaned for didn’t notice she had changed. I guess it was a small event, a resurrected African jumping out the gap in her front teeth. I guess it looked like a cockroach; that’s what she was supposed to have, not dignity. My mother just couldn’t get excited about the Beatles, those mops she swilled in ammonia everyday on their heads. Besides, she didn’t work like a dog but like a woman; they aren’t the same. The hair was growing long for the same reasons Pinocchio’s nose did. I can think only of a lesbian draping crepe paper chains over my head to make a black Rapunzel possible; that’s how a white woman tried to lift my burdens. At the time I didn’t reject her for being lesbian or white but for both burdens. That was when I didn’t want Ivory soap to be what cleaned me, made me presentable to society. All the suds I’d seen were white, they still are but who cares? I’m more interested in how soap dwindles in my hand, under the faucet. I’m old enough to remember blocks of ice, old enough or poor enough. I remember chipping away at it, broken glass all over the floor. Later in the riots, the broken glass of looting tattled how desperate people were to keep cool. There are roses now in my mother’s yard. Sometimes she cuts them, sets them in Pepsi bottles throughout her rooms. She is, I admit, being sentimental. Looting her heart. My father who planted them is gone. That mop in the corner is his cane growing roots.