The Ones with Thorns

May 11, 2021
I hear only the occasional rasping
meow of the nineteen-year-old cat, the whirring
of the computer's fan, my chair creaking,
and swish and slide and catch of the pen..
I imagine your despair, bearing your down,
sliding you down the bathroom does,
folding you in third, crumpling you
into your tears, hands, and long hair covering your face.
You know you cannot save your lovely, tender son,
and the only food in your mouth is sand.
You starve on knowing
just as surely that you cannot save yourself.

I have had bleak times,
the times when everyone seems
obscured, separated from me by the gray screen
that only I can see impenetrable and airless.

There seems to be no future then,
no beauty, no hope. Even I decided to live
for the people who love me, for those who depend
on me, it was never because I had hope.

But flowers have helped--their magic, their abundance,
their abandon.

Their magic, designed to draw insects, birds,
and the wind, draws me too. I put my face
against their petals. Not just to smell them,
but also to feel the caress of their petals.

Flowers have brought me light and air and food
when I was starving, perhaps as you are now.
Flowers get through. Roses cut through.

My father, brought up near "The City," he'd say,
in Northern California along the jagged, cool coast,
was fascinated, for all the forty years
he lived and taught in Central Pennsylvania, he loved being in a place
that had four seasons. He never tired of the smooth and secret transitions. There,
in winter, he loved to see the snow rolled out,
marked by deer tracks, and the ones left by
by bunnies, squirrels, and the cats who stalked them
in the whiteness. Even better was
the broad yard up to the woods showing no tracks at all,
and the feeling my should do penance if you
crossed that virginal space.

There, in the beginning of February, mud season comes.
Freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw.
The beginning of spring is just plug ugly.

But where the Goddess's toes grip the snow,
they make a place for the snowdrops to bloom,
white heads bowed like postulants, rare,
and hard to see.

At the equinox, my tradition celebrates
faith in the spring.
By the time the snow
has all cleared out, except for filthy
ice mountains in grocery store parking lots,
the crocuses my mother planted here and there
in the yard like Easter eggs, come up.

Crocuses show off not just their white and purple petals,
but also their precious saffron stamens, gingerly gathered,
one by one, to make their pricey seasoning.

At Beltane, the tiniest threads of summer
begin to weave their dark web of green
leaves and moss, always moss up here. And we
will weave the maypole and dance
the festival of flowers,
the raucous days and nights of delight.

Here, in my Pacific Northwest yard,
the roses begin their climb toward supremacy,
teasing us with a burst
of leaves before their bedding Grinch heads.

Here at Rosewood house,
it is the season of the periwinkle and the primrose.
The owner of Rosewood before us planted
a pin: the opening of the path
and the flagstones
are lined with primroses, tucked
against the periwinkle blue vinca minor, the vine
that's always getting up in everyone's personal space.

Here, by summer, in the yard at Rosewood
and all over Bridgetown, it's roses and roses.
Where we first moved here, roses
completely untended grew around
grew around four telephone poles
outside our house.
The International Rose Test Garden is here.
There is a whole neighborhood devoted to its four
quarters, four gardens of nothing but roses.

Rosewood has yellow with peace, called
the Love-and Peace. Velvet red, of course.
The pink of a white baby's eyelid--
nearly blue in the center.

Back in Central Pennsylvania,
it's bachelor's buttons, and the sweetness
of bee balm with black-eyed Susans, snapdragons, salvia.
And borage, which my father claimed never existed.
Here, euphorbia stands tall and bushy just everywhere,
but we share, Oregon and Pennsylvania
the ballgown layers of white and purple phlox
tumbling over stone walls and onto sidewalks.
There grow the ranks of alium,
with onion heads and onion roots,
Here and there we share the alyssum, the hydrangea,
the blessing of peonies.

Here there are roses, roses, roses.
Two weeks ago now, when the forsythia began to bloom,
the roses were pruned back right on time,
a good eighteen inches. Today they are covered in new red leaves,
rapped by spring's green fingers.
Their thorns are out.

I have left out so many: the tall
Autumn Sunset sedum and the sedum you can walk on
with new leaves that look like tiny green flowers.
The dogwood that overlooks Rosewood's courtyard
and which my father taught me pious legends about.

"Blown," Daddy called roses when they were
in their death throes, just about to lose
their petals, but not yet. A strong wind
will take them, and I pray for stillness. Will I ever
stop loving the ephemeral?
Yet the thorns will stay.

I could draw or paint or kiss
the same rose every day, from when
its leaves start to fold into that ragged
cone until only the hips remain.

The ones I leave behind, so many flowers
I love and have left out, like ancestors
unnamed in a ceremony. No unloved,
not without their place. But this list,
this Procession of the Flowers is for you.
Those unnamed may rest, uncut,
unmolested by this worshiper