The next is about a flower.
And not a carnivorous one, either, it's
about the nasturtium.
I guess you all know that the nasturtium.
I say this because a very sophisticated friend of mine,
in his 30s, I would have thought knew
the nasturtium had no idea what I was talking about.
You know, it's that garden flower
that, anyway in California, grows almost anywhere,
it grows wild.
It's kind of shell-shaped.
You have it, I'm sure, everywhere.
It's the first thing you give to children to plant,
because it always comes up.
You give them this huge seed and they can't miss it.
And they plant it, and it always grows.
This is about a nasturtium that ventures into the street
and becomes a kind of street person, I guess.
This is one this is one of a few, a group of magical poems
that I'll read now.
Nasturtium, born in a soil waste lot,
you labored up to light, bunching
what strength you'd got and running out of sight
through a nut hole, at last, to come forth in the sun,
as if without a past.
Done with it, we begun.
Now, street side of the fence, you take a few green turns,
nimble in nonchalance, before your first flower burns.
From poverty and prison and undernourishment,
a prodigal has risen.
Self-spending, never spent, regular yellow shell
and drooping spur behind.
Not rare, but beautiful.
Street handsome, as you wind and leap,
hold after hold, a golden runaway, still running,
strewing gold from side to side all day.
It's a wonderful flower, you get so many flowers from no trouble
at all.
I say that as a gardener.
In one's middle age, one becomes a gardener.
Nothing could have interested me less, until I was about 40.
And gardening, now I love it.