Winter flowers,
their fragility
— the sweet peas
above the fireplace.
I imagine Mendel
in the backyard,
pruning plants with
striped sepals,
stems with buds
opening down.
A blood orange
bee saunters in
on the noontime
wind, rests her
wings on the
vase, some pollen
rides her neck,
her spotted
waist. She visits us,
then Mendel, then
our neighbors who
bring kumquats
in late November
as their children
head to school.
I think of how
I learned to count
parents, children,
grandchildren in
a notebook,
tally who gave
me my tongue,
my hair which
stands up on
your skin, my eyes
strained against
your whispers
to pour out
the water, to bring
up the drapes, but
I step down the
staircase and forget
to close the
window and forget
to replace this
group of thoughts
with the next.
Patches of dew, kneeling down
I keep warm in my mother’s
hair her swallows humming in
my cheek I’ve waited the length
of a photograph tumbled
the weight of her buried bones
now the elms no longer whisper
now I see a man in flannel carrying irises
the brook which separates us
is brown stamp this place with
a duration we are within the reach
of some god and each carrying
shelf stable prayer books before
we could read we imagined every
word as our mother’s which
casket is the labeled one or
whose every time I mourn
I lower myself I cleave myself
but still the light peeks in through
the top of the well boarded up
***
Photograph of Karthik Sethuraman by Kevin Lu.
