their cones of color. The blooms themselves frivolous—
the tiny petals no more than ruffled bits of tissue
staining car hoods and sidewalks after summer rain.
It is July as I cross from Main onto Spring Street
where the trees once more have burst into a gaudy pink.
Memory somersaults to childhood.Summer not interim
but stasis—months seemingly passed on the front steps,
caught in an illusion of rescue. Days whose sole intensity
converged in blooms alive with girlish fancy. The twinge
now in my chest, the longing for redress for the child
I once was—always too hopeful, too willing to wait
on the front steps of a street where no traffic ever passed.
For three years now, the one we planted here has reneged,
withheld from us the favor of its flowers—their color just a
memory,
a plastic ribbon tied to a limb.Altitude, perhaps.The winters
too cold, sabotaging the first bout of spring with
onslaughts
of snow. Or phosphate, inadequate in this mountain soil.
This fall, when its leaves turn the colors of citrus fruit, I
will
kneel at its base and scratch a girdle round its roots.There
I will blend bone meal with gritty dirt. Come June, I will
wait
like the child on the front steps in expectation of its
bloom.
SEPTEMBER MELANCHOLY
"Maybe
it was just the usual September melancholy,
made unfamiliar by circumstances. . . ."
—John Banville, The Book of Evidence
I wait for those chill days highlighted by the sun's
indifference,
wasting leaves mingled with pine straw,
the redolence of decay in soil upturned for planting—
not these rainsoaked days, grass rangy with neglect,
blooms of coneflowers and zinnas asag from heavy water.
I see myself suffused with autumn's grace.
Face flushed with exertion, each day granted purpose
by a calendar now adrift in time.Even idleness
somehow hallowed—the pleasure of late sleep enriched
by coffee on the deck and the cool air against my face.
Meanwhile, I sit inside, a book lying idle in my lap,
and listen to the rush of rain on the leaves.At times
I rise from the chair beside the window, force myself
to walk the dogs even though it's wet.Tomorrow perhaps
if the sun dries out the water on the deck, I will sit
outside and watch the last of the hummingbirds, the whirr
of their wings obscuring the lethargy of the day.
Retired after a career of teaching high school and college
in Norfolk, Virginia, Lynda Self now resides in the mountains of Western North
Carolina.Her poems have appeared
in The Southern Review, The Georgia
Review, The New England Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Threepenny Review, and Innisfree Poetry Journal.Recent
poems will appear in forthcoming issues of The Sow's Ear Poetry
Review, Confrontation, and North
Carolina Literary Review.
