Remembering in Lilac and Heart-Shaped Leaves, and: Sub Rosa

Remembering in Lilac and Heart-Shaped Leaves

Holcomb Gardens

See how they've laid out the lilacs.
A parade - seven rows across,
sixteen down. And I who never
cared much for spring, the pasteled chirp
and buzz of it, lose myself among them -
tuba in the flutes, nettle in the iris bed.
It isn't the scent, though they beat out
last month's hyacinths guaranteed to stink up
a whole house despite their famous hair.

Look, my middle name's not Joy.
It's Ruth, named for the stranger
sniffling and nose-blowing her way
across wilderness, following the scuff
of a mother-in-law's shoe. Ruth the Moabite,
the Blotter, the Good, programmed
to soak up sorrow the way an unlit match
is programmed to absorb the dark.

You know this story -
how she stood, lightning rod
in the fields of luck where everyone knows
rich equals handsome equals virtuous.
And if Boaz turned out Palooka
who scratched his parts and wore his
money belt to bed, who bibbled over dinner
about goats and the price of barley,
who eyed her bodice while he grouched
of fallow fields and picked his ear,
who wants to know?

It's beginnings we want. Act I.
Curtain up, and there she is
standing amid Keats's alien corn - woman
on the threshold, Rachel at the well,
Cinderella before the ball or Juliet after,
trembling toward sacrifice. How we want
to keep them in that moon's first spotlight -
Ruth's straight back, Juliet's hand to cheek
in gesture and cue with Romeo the nail-biter
swoony behind lilacs - the night air
staggering beneath the weight
of all their untaken breaths.

Sub Rosa

This year snow came late. The spring rains
early. Pressed in between, he failed.

That is, he couldn't hold on any longer
although they tried - fourteen drips, tubes
in as many orifices - or so it seemed.
Finally, the body wants its worm.

So he died. The thorn of who he was
or whether it had been enough, intact.
The closed door remained closed.
The seal unbroken. Maybe that's why
his family let it go on so long - two weeks
in that icy room holding his feet, his hands,
hoping for a sign, a twinge, a squeeze, anything
beyond what machines can count, what a doctor's
half-closed lids blink and refuse to deliver.

But it's words they wanted, what they
put him on the rack for - this husband,
father, this gruff man who never talked, who
ran his life the way he ran his grocery store,
lining up his days in rows of impenetrable tins,
face front, labeled, stamped.

But I remember the summers he could still
get out to tend his roses. How each Saturday
he'd choose one for the vase, crowning the bud
flaring into perfection. And how in June
when roses, so packed they jostle on stems the way
certain words of a poem will push, insisting
in the mouth, he'd line up four or five
on the kitchen counter where everyone could see -
one shameless beauty after another still throbbing
from the stem, like the sobs of a sentence
or the relief of betrayal
stammered by the heart's red tongue.