Blossom

My mother's flower garden cuts a half-moon

into the deepening lawn. Musk of Tiger Lily,

milk-sweetness of Rose, teasing lilt of Gardenia

and Iris. I'd watch her, digging, routing

in the earth, planting rows of nubile flowers that dipped

their pious heads to topsoil and loam.

I was thirteen that spring,

mired in the teeming hothouse

of adolescence. When my mother

went into the hospital, I didn't know

if she'd ever come out. Outside the acrid sterility of her room

I saw the outline of April, fusion of violets, a boy's hot breath

on my prickling neck and the terrifying thrill

of a new skin, sweating earth and resin.

Thirteen sprung like the head of Zeus

into the blinding green, wailed like a banshee,

piping loud. My mother was wilted, pale like the other side

of a shadow, and I loved her in the shroud of pubescent grief

while saplings outside the window burst

into blossom.

My mother, digging

in her garden again. I saw the dark flowering,

the malignant forest that took root and sprung up

in her body like a storm, sucked out of whatever it is

that makes you swoon on a deep summer night.

Beneath all this ravage, my mother

was planting. Annuals, female fatales that wither

and sink back to the earth when the ball is over.

Perennials, smug in their thin parody

of immortality. Tulips. Marigolds. Sex black-eyed Susans.

My mother's harvest, something to hold

heart to petal, curve of spine to stamens, the pull

of the earth on muscle and bone. Something was breaking

that spring, and blossoming. Something to hold onto, to burn

in the memory like the imprint of a star. Whatever it is

that you plant in the earth, and tend to, it is just as easily

taken away. I watched my mother, trying to hold

onto what anchored her to this world, and something inside me

opened.