Selected Poems

Planting Roses                 

It’s like burying all the girls
I once loved: Belinda, Bonica, and Blue Girl, 
fragrant names for these bare canes
each with a clump of roots like witch’s hair
arranged on the soft pillow of earth. I have aerated 
and enriched this soil, added peat moss, 
blood meal, and rotten manure to make 
these roses bloom again. I have put them to bed
in mounds of richest compost.

And when they put out the first 
blushing leaves after the last freeze 
in mid March, they show 
something is remembered there 
in the root and grafted stem
something of the green passion of summer 
awakening, growing up before me 
until the prim buds shyly open to reveal 
the many curtained chambers of their psyches. 
Their petals are softer than skin,
their incandescent perfume more personal and rare
than that of any girl. In an inner room
a goddess undresses, letting flares of velvet red
sun yellow, salmon, orange, or white
fall away in a fusion of fragrance and flesh, 
the mind of God revealed in the beauty 
of inanimate things.

Even when all the flowers have been cut
and the canes are pruned for winter
sap pulses still in the lopped green stems
and beauty is the wound remembering 
the praise and glory of being, the fruit
for which the root lives in darkness, always. 
Beauty is the nakedness of things
the cane before the first leaf
the rosebud awakening 
from the decadent dream of the root.

(published in Blue Unicorn)