Or glads, as we called them,
their spikes shooting up every summer
in my grandmother’s garden.
Finally a wife with a small plot
of ground, I planted my own,
pushed the tubers down
deep. Wiped my hands on my jeans.
Waited two months. They bloomed.
Bending over their folds of magenta
and scarlet, I raked my left cornea
over the stub left behind by my scissors.
I stood with bouquet in arms, Oh,
this means nothing, nothing at all,
but the world had become blurred
and stayed that way. One week. Another,
until I was forced to admit I could not change
this other world no longer sharpened
by edges. It floated like what lies
beneath a pond’s surface. It shimmered.
The skin of my eye had been sheared
by the wound of a cut blossom,
liquid of Lorca’s doomed verde.
No help but to let the eye doctor
scrape off the crud of that old skin
and let the new grow back again.
Aren’t you glad, my eye blinked,
once the bandage came off,
that again you can see how
the stamens hang quivering,
the hand reaching out for the stalk?
This poem first appeared in Aretha's Hat: Inauguration Day 2009, Ash Creek, Press. For more about this publication, go to www.poemeleon.org. To order the chapbook, go to www.citylightsnc.com.
