The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Robert Claps
Portals
At the garden store’s summer clearance sale, you paid three dollars for this glass feeder with a cobalt blue finish and four flower-shaped ports to accommodate those almost weightless messengers who come here to refuel as they travel, between this world and maybe the one in which your daughter now lives. Hand me a nail, love: let’s hang it, brimming with sweetened water, above your wicker reading chair; sometimes routine tasks suffice, other times we live on Zoloft and luck. What price would pay to whirl out of your limbs and follow those flocks forming in our oaks? The resurrection season is nowhere in sight, but watch that hummer, persistent, flying sideways, then back pedaling at the same time until it finds, half-buried in weeds, the one flower still intact, and, sustaining its hover, lights into your blood, its bird heart now yours, pea-sized but pumping hard, its beaded eyes your clear eyes that don’t even blink when you look up into fall’s unrelenting blue. Weeding
Each April, on the first warm day, with dandelions already shoving their way up between the greening blades, she’d lead me around the yard pointing to her perennials circling the mailbox and running the length of the gravel drive, making sure I didn’t mistake them for the weeds. she was about to yank, her gardening fork’s tines flashing in my mind again this twentieth spring of her death. I’m out with the sprayer, whispering crocus, tulip, iris, bending close to double-check, looking for the yellow stalk and thick, fleshy leaves of that weed she loathed, reminding me, once, as she kneeled in the turned bed, that my father would be buying rounds at Baldy’s Tap, that his empty half-pints still clinked and rolled under the car seat, whispering that I, too, should watch my step if I wanted to stay married, before she’d thrust her spade deep under another spreading dandelion, then proudly hold up the root, with its hairs so pale and delicate in the blinding spring light. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |