Designed for Flight: Poems

Ficus

36 Ficus The morning he drove off, she pretended not to notice, not to feel like a dope shoving food in her mouth, half chewing on her hands. At the pantry window she listened to the grackle’s transformational grammar, the sapsucker’s Morse code, believing their messages unchanged. She studied the unmown lawn, imagined grass first nibbled in Eden, then pondered death, napping in the cramped quarters of jackknives and bullet chambers, or snoring in an unforeseen pandemic. These distractions, for a time, worked wonders. But then she recalled the way he talked about the bleached period of the moon, running around in search of a sentence to end. Perhaps she should never have insisted it was wrong to keep butterflies and angels out of poems. Can you blame them now, she’d asked, for refusing invitations? That morning as he pulled away, she convinced herself he was headed out on errands, despite the crates of clothes and books crammed in the trunk, the potted ficus in the back. Then, late afternoon, it struck her—the lushness of the plant, blocking his rearview mirror. ...