Spring Planting
This is the season when our friends may and will die daily.
—Robert Lowell, "Soft: Wood"
Last year's sunflower stalks blacken at dusk, their huge exploded suns droop like the heads of mourners, frozen in somber procession.
I carry my seedlings from the car— snap peas, radishes, an experimental pole bean . . .
My little green homunculi, my hostages to a future season, you've hardened in April's tonic breeze.
We say you'll bear in so many weeks, that we'll be here to share the fruit— it's easy to imagine the future wrong.
The four-year mimosa tree stands pale and spring-naked, a body's length taller than last year, and seems to belong.
Years back, at Temple Israel Sunday School on Saturdays, we donated flattened one-dollar bills for planting trees in newborn Israel. Survivors would "make the desert bloom"— Reform American kids helped prevent erosion. I imagined dark enormous pines, my father's sweet name a plaque on one I'd never find . . .
My friend, your last days among us, you were such a frail leaf tossing in pain's hurricane, until morphine finally took you to sleep with my other lost ones in a distant forest . . .
I place the flats on the ground by a rusty trowel. Soon, when the mimosa blossoms again, its delicate pink blooms will sway in the Cape's harsh wind, and drop—
oriental creature, its feathery flowers are evanescent as the colorless smoke your last cigarette blew across my room.
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