39 Flower poems

I count nineteen white blossoms which would not be visible except for their wiry stems that catapult them above the grass like the last white pop of fireworks, a toothed blast of leaf below. It’s the Fourth of July on the bank of Hinkson Creek fifty years ago, the powder- bitterness, the red combustion, my life, since anemos means wind, means change, no matter that I’ve been held all along in this thin twenty miles of atmosphere. The wind’s disturbed the leaves, rolled the waves, convincing enough. Each star of a bloom is driven upward almost against its small nature. All it can do is hang on and die. Still, it did want to go as high as possible, for some reason, to sway up there like an art object.

September 14, 1915 It's how she spreads, without a sound, her scent of orange blossom on the dark of me, it is the way she shrouds in mourning black her mother-of-pearl and ivory, the way she wears the lace ruff at her throat, and how she turns her face, quite voiceless, self-possessed, because she takes the language straight to heart, is thrifty with the words she speaks. It's how she is so reticent yet welcoming when she comes out to face my panegyrics, the way she says my name mocking and mimicking, makes gentle fun, yet she's aware that my unspoken drama is really of the heart, though a little silly; it's how, when night is deep and at its darkest, we linger after dinner, vaguely talking and her laughing smile grows fainter and then falls gently on the tablecloth; it's the teasing way she won't give me her arm and then allows deep feeling to come with us when we walk out, promenading on the hot colonial boulevard. . . Because of this, your sighing, modest style of love, I worship you, my faithful star who like to cloud yourself about in mourning, generous, hidden blossom; kindly mellowness who have presided over my thirty years with the self-denying singleness a vase has, whose half-blown roses wreathe with scent the headboard of a convalescent man; cautious nurse, shy serving maid, dear friend who trembles with the trembling of a child when you revise the reading that we share; apprehensive, always timid guest at the feast I give; my ally, humble dove that coos when it is morning in a minor key, a key that's wholly yours. May you be blessed, modest, magnificent; you have possessed the highest summit of my heart, you who are at once the artist of lowly and most lofty things, who bear in your hands my life as if it was your work of art! O star and orange blossom, may you dwindle gently rocked in an unwedded peace, and may you fade out like a morning star which the lightening greenness of a meadow darkens or like a flower that finds transfiguration on the blue west, as it might on a simple bed.

Morning glories, pale as a mist drying, fade from the heat of the day, but already hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg hooks have found and are boarding them. This could do for the sack of the imaginary fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as they one by one vanish and leave still real only what has been snatched out of the spell. I’ve never seen bees more purposeful except when the hive is threatened. They know the good of it must be grabbed and hauled before the whole feast wisps off. They swarm in light and, fast, dive in, then drone out, slow, their pantaloons heavy with gold and sunlight. The line of them, like thin smoke, wafts over the hedge. And back again to find the fleet gone. Well, they got this day’s good of it. Off they cruise to what stays open longer. Nothing green gives honey. And by now you’d have to look twice to see more than green where all those white sails trembled when the world was misty and open and the prize was there to be taken.

Asters—sweltering days old adjuration/curse, the gods hold the balance for an uncertain hour. Once more the golden flocks of heaven, the light, the trim— what is the ancient process hatching under its dying wings? Once more the yearned-for, the intoxication, the rose of you— summer leaned in the doorway watching the swallows— one more presentiment where certainty is not hard to come by: wing tips brush the face of the waters, swallows sip speed and night.

The lilacs lift in generous bloom Their plumes of dear old-fashioned flowers; Their fragrance fills the still old house Where left alone I count the hours. High in the apple-trees the bees Are humming, busy in the sun,— An idle robin cries for rain But once or twice and then is done. The Sunday-morning quiet holds In heavy slumber all the street, While from the church, just out of sight Behind the elms, comes slow and sweet The organ’s drone, the voices faint That sing the quaint long-meter hymn— I somehow feel as if shut out From some mysterious temple, dim And beautiful with blue and red And golden lights from windows high, Where angels in the shadows stand And earth seems very near the sky. The day-dream fades—and so I try Again to catch the tune that brings No thought of temple nor of priest, But only of a voice that sings.

Nothing is the way you think it is going to be. Take this little flower from me, and let it go into the way you think of it. And so it grows and is the face of Daisy the cow speaking, she my young grandma growing and wearing a pink slip and who fell from the sky that was clear blue and pure all over the place you called home as it moved out from under you in the slow rotation of the sphere you call a star, a flower, a mind.

I Once I had 1000 roses. Literally 1000 roses. I was working for a florist back in the shambling ‘Thirties when iced skids of 250 roses sold for $2 at Faneuil Hall. So for $8 I bought 1000 roses, 500 white and 500 red, for Connie’s wedding to steadiness. I strewed the church aisle whole and the bride came walking on roses, roses all the way: The white roses and the red roses. White for the bed we had shared. Red for the bed she went to from the abundance in her to the fear in what she wanted. The gift was not in the roses but in the abundance of the roses. To her whose abundance had never wholly been mine, and could never be his. He had no gift of abundance in him but only the penuries of sobriety. A good steady clerk, most mortgageable, returning in creaking shoes over the white and the red roses. Returning over the most flowering he would ever touch, with the most flowering I had ever touched. A feast of endings. II This morning I passed a pushcart heaped with white carnations as high as if there had fallen all night one of those thick-flaked, slow, windless, wondering snows that leave shakos on fence posts, polar bears in the hedges, caves in the light, and a childhood on every sill. Once, twice a year, partially, and once, twice a lifetime, perfectly, that snow falls. In which I ran like a young wolf in its blood leaping to snap the flower-flakes clean from the air; their instant on the tongue flat and almost dusty and not enough to be cold. But as I ran, face-up, mouth open, my cheeks burned with tears and flower-melt, and my lashes were fringed with gauze, and my ears wore white piping. There is no feast but energy. All men know—have known and will remember again and again—what food that is for the running young wolf of the rare days when shapes fall from the air and may be had for the leaping. Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty. And how they are instantly nothing— a commotion in the air and in the blood. —And how they are endlessly all. III My father’s grave, the deepest cave I know, was banked with snow and lilies. We stuck the dead flowers into the snow banks dirty with sand and trampled by digger’s boots. The flowers, stiff and unbeckoning, ripped from their wires in the wind and blew their seasons out as snow Purer than the snow itself. A last abundance correcting our poverties. I remember the feasts of my life, their every flowing. I remember the wolf all men remember in his blood. I remember the air become a feast of flowers. And remember his last flowers whitening winter in an imitation of possibility, while we hunched black in the dirtied place inside possibility where the prayers soiled him. If ever there was a man of abundances he lies there flowerless at that dirty center whose wired flowers try and try to make the winter clean again in air. And fail. And leave me raging as the young wolf grown from his day’s play in abundance to the ravening of recollection. Creaking to penury over the flower-strew. IV This morning I passed a pushcart heaped beyond possibility, as when the sun begins again after that long snow and the earth is moonscaped and wonderlanded and humped and haloed in the light it makes: an angel on every garbage can, a god in every tree, that childhood on every sill.—At a corner of the ordinary. Where is she now? Instantly nothing. A penury after flower-strew. Nothing. A feast of glimpses. Not fact itself, but an idea of the possible in the fact. —And so the rare day comes: I was again the young wolf trembling in his blood at the profusions heaped and haloed in their instant next to the ordinary. And did not know myself what feast I kept —till I said your name. At once all plenty was. It is the words starve us, the act that feeds. The air trembling with the white wicks of its falling encloses us. To be perfect, I suppose, we must be brief. The long thing is to remember imperfectly, dirtying with gratitude the grave of abundance. O flower-banked, air-dazzling, and abundant woman, though the young wolf is dead, all men know—have known and must remember— You.

I have seventeen rose varieties and nobody warned me about the opinions they'd have each one wanting something different like children, but thornier and less talkative

I stopped mowing one section of the lawn just left it and waited by june it was full of things i didn't plant that didn't need me