One more flower poem about something
that I used to do before I was divorced.
Going--
[LAUGHTER]
I don't do that anymore.
Evidently.
But this is a poem about going out and digging up flowers
on Sunday mornings around--
you don't see these places.
I don't in places like New York state or Connecticut,
but in the South, there are all these abandoned house
sites, where there's sometimes a chimney but no house
there at all.
But there's a little border of daffodil flowers in the spring
so that you know where the house was.
And we used to go out, Kitsu and I and the kids,
instead of going to church I guess,
and on Sunday, while people were in church,
and dig up the flowers.
And you bring them home and then you're plant them
in the yard and they flop.
But then the next year they stand up,
and that has nothing to do with what's in this poem.
I'm introducing this thing all wrong,
but it's called Digging Flowers.
The reference in here to Coley is my son too.
Sunday during church, filling upside down garbage
can lids with clumps of daffodils and the sod
around them, zinc buckets, coffee cans, clay pots,
whatever we could find.
Not much traffic to watch us, stealing part of their vision
around the curve, making the VW bus look like a hearse,
so stuffed with flowers.
Coley in the mimosa and thorns that have grown up
finds an ivy house.
Kitsu says this feels like the beach, the wind,
the way we're all doing different things.
The blade face of my new shovel cuts through vines and roots,
gets under a patch on all four sides,
and lifts with whiskers hanging on.
Last night we talked a long while
about divorce, who should move where, how to write it up.
My brain goes black sometimes in the strong vinegar
it makes of what I've lost and continue to waste digging
in the borders of a house that isn't here,
except for its borders.
Driving home to transplant them with an idea for poem.
Black moisture in the ground, the watery light
inside these yellow flowers.