Gladiolus, Chrysanthemums

Gladiolus, Chrysanthemums

And yet, haven’t we each attempted that trick, desiring

ourselves into wideness, more wideness, until we are lost?

                                                              the Mesmer

                                                             Jane Hirshfield

Like most people you shortened the main

name of the flowers you loved best,

the eventually top-heavy gladiola and the afro-

spread chrysanthemum.  And don’t both

need to winter over somehow, in the dark,

on the rocky cellar shelf after opening box

after box at Christmas time, because your mother-

in-law knew she couldn’t go wrong giving

you the mums.  She was capable of such

a quiet and lengthy nourishing as that, hands

through all your winters, but sitting, sitting

in her dormant sheath.  Still, she let you dig

the requirements she taught you early on, in early

spring, and to wait for mid-summer for the color

to break out into your gloomy world.  And she’d

bring a pot or two of mums, and leave them

on the doorstep for you when you wouldn’t

open the door to her, and they’d immediately

go to rust under your care.  You didn’t dead-head

anything but your children, other than what was
offered by chance from the sky and often
your cats who backed up

to let fly a spray of piss that was so wide

reaching it could be tasted in the living room if

the window was open.  And those poor gladiolas:

stalky, blossoms all on one side like flute

holes, opening up on the stem with that precision

coded in them: to open when the sun, when the rain,

when the fog…but always on a day you weren’t at

your best or even wanting to be, all day

granting favor unpredictably, or taking it

in just the same way, with blushed and boisterous

fury sometimes, or quite casually, almost bored

with it all, and usually when the whole

kit and kaboodle had come on and the glads, the best

ones, the ones we’d all been holding out for given

the picture on the box.  When I called you about

the killed boy, my friend, I bet you were on your way
to the garden.  He was the one who used to hit me hard

(but in fun he said) and I let him, who taught me
how to shoot a gun, in the woods, all day that one day  

aching in the deeper shadows and we were out
of the houses we both lived in, how we were
shivering with impact like those flowers:

how they rose up from the ground and opened all

at once, high on in their entire vibrancy, so hopped up

on it in fact, so that knowing anything about coming down

after such a flourish was impossible.  Because when
I call I imagine, like I said, you’re on your way
to the lawn, and you’re blown over,
you’re streaked with mud but otherwise ok, full bloom, taken

off just above the ground level, neither shocked

nor silent, because the season has arrived, it has

finally arrived and before we have a chance to remember

how much we’d both planted and when, and where,

(because later you’d let the flowerbeds go

to grass) I see you take the scissors that afternoon

even though you’re a little drunk, and when the rain

cleared I set you to salvage a ravished section

of a bent two or three unstaked stalks, and take them in

gently as I’ve ever seen you touch anything, to the water-

filled vase you'd dropped an asprin in, and walk a mile
down the road, glass and stagger, to the window
of his mother, just then

gone to make arrangements herself, to weed through

and pick the best, the very best, out of what has fallen.