Two weeks into February
I climb the hill to see them,
their fierce forms thrust up, fight in cold
to grow in green of green,
these Daffodils of the ridge,
swollen, sickly somber, sulfurous-colored bulbs
about to burst open, unfurl, extend.
Timeless symbol; image of beauty,
of spirit, of soul,
of that immortal unwillingness to die,
of so much self-importance,
a little, twirled dance of wind.
Silvery skein of the thousand kinds,
their yellow multitudes rising from the ground
as if they spilled themselves,
their sameness and difference recognized,
an un-refuted presence.
I once saw a place on Boggess land
where a house once stood.
Years had changed the yard to woods,
no house or any sign of human life,
though in the spring
yellow petals flourished for more than thirty yards.
All the eye could see was Easter,
fold upon fold in endless, constellated clumps.
Just past where the kitchen was,
almost two dozen buds
in moss-splotched, red brick,
coaxed into the warmth of descending daylight.
I sit on a beam once part of the old house,
now rotted, burnt, back to earth.
My thoughts,
somewhere in the vapor trail,
somewhere on the ground.
Though a flower is a flower
and really nothing more.
Their showy fortitude, purely cosmetic,
everything imposed on what they are.
Each season in fullness,
each time a few more.
How they came here, I don’t know,
though they scatter this area where the house once stood,
even before the place ever had our name.
A woman cried
and where her tears fell on soil,
there,
they grew.
We should all hope for such an etiology.
My grandma on my father’s side,
Lucille Mae Robinson, planted flowers.
She used to talk about Irises
gathered from the Simpkins homeplace
out on the edge of Priestly Woods in Logan Field.
She brought back white ones
and these that grow on the bank in front of the house,
purple, gold and black with exotic spots like leopards.
We would walk through the yard on Sunday afternoons
and she would tell us type and origins
with no taxonomy;
a Snow-Ball Bush beside the coal pile,
Lamb’s Ear and Day Lilies,
yellow Forsythia, Crocus beside the front steps.
There is a white, Rose of Sharon,
a width of almost twenty-feet,
so wide that resembled the shell of Venus.
She set Naked Ladies, Adam & Eve,
Dhalias, Lilac Bushes, Four-O’Clocks, Peonies.
In old photographs I saw
those smaller Cactus plants she kept in pots on her porch.
Hard sounds were not made for flowers,
petals so spindled and spare,
the pollen dust alone
be-stirred of Bluebirds could be
the only blessing I would bear.
What am I to think of this?
All this talk of flowers in the woods.
Deprivation is too easy,
though honesty is good;
scent of earthen wind;
the simple glory of a mild, spring day.
Tears almost, they seem, and as they grow, will bulge,
shrivel in pulprous ocher,
the outer layer onion-like,
split from side to side,
light brown scales cast down,
color, the contour of petals,
a clustering of gestalt.
These forms renew, they show no age.
Only a human mind gets caught up in things;
mutability.
And these only evoke unspoken eloquence.
A hand in the sedge clutches at leaves.
Never even that almost.
When I woke up this April morning
everything was covered in snow as far as you could see.
The slumped limbs dripped in silence,
and birds were flitting here and there
as if spring already proclaimed itself.
First flowers yesterday;
a Dandelion, yard flowers,
Ground Squirrel in the woods.
Bulbs laden with a heavy layer.
A few seem changed,
deeper striped in sickened tones.
The horns of Judas must have been colored such.
Overcast sifts down a flurry.
All this will melt in a day.
In early spring,
six petals open, fully spread,
golden-yellow trumpets, frilly, feminine edges,
sanded blades of grass in the background.
They don’t die.
These always grow back,
mutable and immutable,
a similitude of permanence.
Star-of-Bethlehem
grow in sparse clusters on this ridge,
Hyacinth I’ve never seen in bloom.
On the 25th, forty degrees,
most of the snow melted away.
One prong has loosed itself,
stands upright toward the sky.
Early March and Robins scatter the ridge.
They hop, stagger,
rounded breasts prominent.
One stilts through warm pasture,
flies a few yards, inches from the ground.
They half warble a call.
Blustery winds batter the ridge.
Only four bulbs,
puckered, scrunched to frilled edge.
The Witch-grass slakes an old song.
One week after wet snows
in the crooked tines of wind,
a few days of sunlight,
small, flame-shaped shoots of spring,
bronze-green reckonings still sealed away
in half-casks of their hazel hulls.
But these trumpets boom.
The time has come.
They’ve unfurled first,
a light-filled hoist of golden light.
A drooped head bows,
semblance of Carnations.
No profusion, no flourish.
A few cold days of rain,
only green whirls in blooms.
Drops cling on each petal’s edge,
yellow trumpet,
sodden shapes pour of light in the sun’s noon cast.
Three disheveled fronds
with the weight of unfolding,
endless curl and coif,
greened-gold-enblustered paradigm of unknowing.
Several days in neutral tones,
now the warmth of spring,
wispy white clouds,
abstracts sprawled all that expanse of azure blue.
Down here,
they seemed to have opened just a little more.
Everything climbs toward life.
A charred, brown stem turns back upon itself.
At the edge of these narrow stalks,
several only slightly wilted,
petal tips extend to fullness.
Half of them broken open now,
two warm days with even Plum Cherry blossoms burst open.
This morning
pollen rolled from a Cedar like risen smoke in sunlight.
Sunday afternoon in pouring sun,
gusts blast the ridge like ocean waves,
everything flung through a tottered wall of wind.
Here in the cool air, the ground
wet with snow-mixed rain from yesterday,
they seem to sag a little more.
Crinkled yellows deeper now to golden,
though many light green stripes
yet locked within their shells.
Spring.
The windward tart, scent of Plum Cherry
twenty yards away.
Branches filled with drone.
Four buzzards cross high above my scalp.
Don’t circle me. I’m not dead.
I bury a Pink Lady
and wait for her to rise.
Heavy Stratus roll in from the West.
My grandma on my mother’s side,
Lelah Mabel Sergent, also planted flowers.
She gave me a peach-colored Azalia Bush once.
In my earliest memory
my grandparents lived in a black and white trailer
with iron railings,
green carpet over a concrete porch.
There were countless cinderblocks
arranged in parallel lines
filled with potting-soil,
large, white, gaudy, squarish,
ceramic planters filled with flowers.
She grew purple, velvet Petunias with
varied shades of red.
I would crush orange Marigolds between my fingers,
sniff petals and stamens as they rolled apart,
that strange, putrid smell.
She grew Cock’s Combs in the yard,
Hosta, Portulaca, a few Roses and Dusty Millers.
She was known for Aloe as a remedy
for every kind of rash.
Potted ferns often hung on the front porch
between the four, white metal columns of their house.
Twelve Thalia erupt overnight,
flattened pastels holding gold cups that resemble little crowns.
Grass has grown in fire-brick,
where black ash and burnt sticks, curve like a nest.
Yellow, staggered descent amid their plumy clouds collide on ground.
A sudden flourish of wings as birds take the hollow.
Everything wakes.
Way out to the right,
one cleft of cloud moves,
a rising wave frozen in the sky,
glows in fractured light.
April.
Into the end of a second week.
They’re almost gone.
Shriveled, frail, crumbling at the touch.
Doubles sway and wag.
Jack Snipes stiffen through a breeze
with most of their green life gone.
In a fist they sound like crinkled tracing paper.
Grass has taken.
Leaves have come on.
Everything is alive.
Just out from the old root cellar,
one, red Triumph.
The oldest apple tree unfolds,
drops its blossoms now.
As if the cold of winter still had gripped them,
frozen in petrified shrouds
frail as onion-skin.
A yellow streak runs down the Doubles.
King runs in sleep,
his nose half-buried in grass
wet with morning rain.
White petals fall from the Plum Cherry,
a flurry of snow scattered in the grove.
The rain begins to spit.
Light, April rain in the woods.
Plum Cherry darken, their scent nearly gone.
Rosas bud to swelled orbs.
My Pink Lady is risen.
Because of beauty, a work of art, forever,
presence beneath presence.
On May fifth I carried
two gallons of creek water to the ridge
for apple yearlings.
Blackberry and Raspberry bloom.
Grain swells red to ripeness, falls.
My Pink Lady grows.
June. Ironweed shoulder high.
Ankle-deep Poison Ivy here and there.
Deer begin to graze again.
There are paths and swaths all over.
There are too many Raspberry to keep.
Apples load the bough,
though only twelve this year on one of the oldest trees.
January
Already an inch from the ground,
green protrusions clutch,
reach up, cling and grow.
Another season’s come.
On February fourth at 3:14 pm
I saw the first Robin on the lower lawn.
Sunday.
Triumph’s petals protrude from the grove.
On the ridge,
first bulbs swell in the sedge.
They seem Apostolic,
growing with the light;
photo-morphs of reason.
First spring flowers,
the 25th on the back-yard slope,
almost unseen,
though with my face pressed close,
microscopic yellow to white and bell-cupped blue.
I am April’s fool of ink.
Climbing this hill just to get inside again.
I come back on days like this;
A walk-made prayer,
self-medicate, heal.
Always an argument with someone.
I in my eternal awe,
I wear not the dunce’s cap.
My points lie in a plowed trace
where years-ago fire and food were enough.
Even that life was flawed, bloodier,
filled with different pains;
the same sins, wars.
I tell myself to be patient.
Make a vigil of vigilance.
Wait. Watch. Listen.
Something good will come of this.
March
Wrapped in a body that will not forget me,
caught up in this self of selves again.
I am a knower who knows not my name.
I think too much at times.
I want to laugh and forget them.
Go, prying eyes, voices of years long dead,
all these distended relationships,
these useless,
pitifully forced associations no one needs.
Bring me April raging with the warmth of spring.
And for a flar,
I am witness to all that’s happened,
to see their fingers thrusting upward to the sun,
in February, even as the snows befell this ground,
frozen and thawed, as if renewed in flourish once again.
Patricia Yvonne Sergent (Robinson), my mother,
also grew flowers.
She grew Petunias, Old Fashioned Roses,
Hybrid Tea Roses, Orchids,
Lavender Irises, Impatients on the porch,
Hosta and Live Forever along the front.
For some reason
she likes Elephant Ears.
There’s a Tulip Tree
with huge, pink blooms in spring.
Orange Day Lilies sprout close to the house.
These women were nurturing people
who each have suffered
in their own way.
One with cancer, now gone,
another struck with Alzheimer’s nine years,
who sometimes says my name,
though forgets me in the next breath.
My mother’s COPD.
The clusters she once loved to see
have made pollen her enemy.
I don’t have the patience nor grace of mothers.
O’ great tenderers,
angels of this old and wondrous earth,
their lives are told in stories
of hand-held photographs,
songs and prayers often heard too late.
Flowers remind us on all occasions
of their strength, wisdom, persistence and love.
On the first day of spring,
King sleeps beside the beam in warmth of sun.
This wind is a lion’s roar.
The sky, a vast blue with sparse cloud.
A cold fifty, though a few apple trees already leafed,
even in the deepest hollows.
These metallic green-tinged spheres
yet to bloom.
Only Golden Trumpets,
a one-week herald of the ridge.
These before me have only one
with some few petals extending, open in the light.
At nine AM through partial cloud
sedge dances in Eastern light.
I reach and pull the leaves away
from half-frozen earth.
Daffodils have spired an inch
at the center of old hearth-stones.
Here again to mull and brood
in the unusual warmth of this morning,
in spring’s rush of wind.
And here, in this place of places,
on this ridge, even in the cold of this new year,
with two wounded by life,
one gone too soon,
I know that flowers will bloom again.
I will make things whole as best I can.
