The Signs Were Clear
at the botanical garden where hot irises pulsed
with hormones, where my daughter asked, won’t you
take me down to fuchsia town? Where I let nature do the heavy lusting,
where trying to read the map, we settled
into our senses. After she dropped her iPhone in the heliotrope,
after macerating our raw emotions, we declared our import impermeable,
our inlets unlettable. Poetry became a kind of piety,
a lien on our longings, its bringing a kind of brining, each line–
No Snapchatting Your Gentians!–a dogged lessening as verse morphed
to virtue. You’re kissing me! squawked
the resolute macaw as we strolled past the barricaded barracudas,
stopping only for a hot cup of repose, halcyon with a twist, our horrors
morphing to hammocks, our fears a giant neon hibiscus.
No longer confined to the banks, we danced like errant isotopes,
asking a penny for your peony? A twenty for your beach verbena?
No matter how many todays ran by like rodents, we’d be,
if not well, at least wielding, not holed up but howled up, hoped up,
raising our violent violets to a trajectory of sob-stopping nasturtiums,
would carry our griefcases to the end
of a short pier, blow out the rushed and breathe in the hushed,
catch a wowie-wowie-wooo-weeeeee wave. I signed my name Meatball,
Masthead, Mashers, anyone but who I’d been,
as I watched our difficults dull, our sufferings suffuse
with spatterdock, no one and nothing able to blue our minds,
our burrs morphing to birds. You can tittle
like a turtle, I assured. Stop maudling and start moving ever closer
to the lyric hills; trade your stigmata and hairshirt for avocets and stilts.
