Wrapped in the satin
Folded around a dream
Wound by the angel
You are seen
By lovers embracing
As the gift handed them in love.
A challenge to an artist
A thorny stem to cross
Petals unfold and fall silently
Into a father's garden
He's held by dutiful tending
His floral dream, her paradise.
Into the morning dew
Walking through fragrance
Admiring the striped candy
The peace found
Clipping and spraying, tending her
Removing those fallen.
Stooping to Tropicana
Holding, inspecting, admiring
Wondering
A man gave his life here
So lost in private angers, trapped in time
Raising up her beautiful blossoms.
Poets find that most complex
This thorny stricken black spotted bush
Host of aphids and beetle
Ugly, quite needing
Tending of gardener
Word smith will transforms her to dozens
Taking on this duty in her regal
Display, returning this care
He is beholder, beheld
Her beauty one day
Revealed
From his caring hand it flows.
She opens her heart, her core
Briefly unfolded
So lush and fragrant
Conceited perhaps,
In the richness of soft petal
She comes.
The robes of velvet,
A queen is found
His heart is beating, there looking
Splendor revealed to him
Receding, closing
She lets it all gently fall away
Down to the rich soil
Her day is ended
Gardener retrieves the remnants
Into calloused palm
The rose has recoiled
She is now gone.
Tulip
Look here in the garden bed
Bright green with a cup of red
Tulip opens to the sun.
Dad grew these behemoths one summer and hung them in the barn
They had been so far above my head I looked up at them as they turned
To see their god sun each day move across our field, that really moved him.
I'd wait to catch them doing it, but it was a slight of head.
Dad showed me, told me of them looking for light and it made the unhappy man laugh
Watching me catching them craning their necks
He cut them and hung them in the barn so heavy with seed
They were falling over outside in the field and rains were threatening
To bring them down to rot, but they were for all the animals to gorge.
We left some out that winter for the birds, putting the heads out on the porch
For our grosbeaks, jays, cardinals, the ones that loved them.
God I loved those sunflowers that were my Dad.
When little I looked up into his sun and moved my head to see
When he was in his fields, in his big unzipped rubber boots
An undershirted round belly moving over his plants
Doing something he loved to do
With his hands in his earth and his mind at peace.
Spiraling in the center of this raw floral beast
Were these times when rafters hung me upside down
Gargantuan beekeepers were surely autumn's mistress
Her trailing seeds fell into our farmyard those years
Raising up step children that grew as our volunteers.
Sunflowers
My sons days
Littered with the shells
Spit out in the anguish
Wrenching at bats
Or flyball to center
Spat as he pitched.
In France I went to Arles
Staying in a farmhouse
Buried in the fields
Of golden sunflowers ripening
The flies descended on us,
Biting black rampant
By the porch we grew
Sunflowers that looked up
Onto the deck through the
Redwood
Not as refined as the clematis
They too were buggy.
It's sizzling my wok
Filled with sunflower oil
And broccoli florets
Making some beef stirfry
For a daughter
Oil from this seedy flower
I taught a unit
Every year about this flower
Planting and watching
It's spiral and heliotropism.
Branded by producers
A worker's flower.
Sunflower
Standing in the sun, a bouquet is gathered in
Set upon a linen skin, in vase that's
Colored blue, slate grey and rose.
Sunflowers are waiting here, still and taken from the gloom
Settled in the drawing room
Awaiting there the one that is to come.
He mixes paint, tries to mark something of their whirling gait
That swirls before his eyes.
Vase of flowers standing still, nothing that connects to real
He pulls his brushes round the forms, inflects a contour
Of music sung, that steps out with a drawing bloom
He moves his dance, the brushes stroke, caressing what is seen
Yellow autumn splashing paint, with center filled with greens and black
The forms are painted with his mark, as if their life flew back,
Still life is representing dream
He turns his canvas to his screen
Revealing veils here never seen, the layers build to mean a whole
The artist transforms the scene, into the lover's eye.
Gladiolus
He said he'd come to dinner
My first for a man
That I ever asked or thought
I wanted
To serve dinner of course
So I made lime jello and it was
Extensive with toasted coconut,nuts and fruit
Dish after dish
Maybe steaks
Bread
And he helped me with the dishes
Standing there
As he washed, I was in love
With these giant green glads
On my table
Making eye contact impossible
It lead to a walk
To walk away all the food
and dessert which was a
White Chocolate cake
We walked to a place to see the lights
Of that town
Sitting down
I laughed at the stalks
in the table
Looking in his eyes
And he gave me a kiss
Quite a few, it was sweeter than the
Gelatin, and I was 21
Forever.
But he said he couldn't hurt me
To explain that was
Not a beginning.
It was just the dinner
I decorated with green glads
Some wine he brought me, a chianti
I set the bookshelf on fire with the candles
But that was later after he went away
That I struggled to stop
the blaze.
Lotus
On the pond in the country we went to fish blue gills
Russ Ellison was wonderful we'd go out to the ponds
Covered with lily pads, frogs, blooms, the lotus it was outstanding
to get a bamboo pole and pretend with the men that we were fishing
For blue gills in our little metal boat.
I'd get a worm and Dad would put it on the line
Or Russ would tie a fly with my brother, they were more serious
The little fish would nip and get caught but we put them back,
It always seemed to me the hook had to harm them.
But to rest in the lily pad pond on his farm
In West Virginia was an act of beauty
Comparable to the blooms I watched being circled by dragonflies.
Russ said the flowers were for Helen and Mary.
Helen was my kindergarten teacher, his daughter.
Their friendship to my family as the lotus
A symbol for awakening to the spiritual reality of life.
Everything Dies Black Rose
At some point in my days of college my hopes died
On a chilly night drug into a parking lot and made real
As real as it gets the flower of youth
Was dead and left were bones and dust.
So I drew those stiff, dry forms in 7 foot drawings of black
On my knees for them willingly
Not drug there and held by hair and smacked senseless
I drew them crouched with arms and legs smudging
Until as soot they lept off the pages bleeding from my fingers
To be forms of the grief I felt with a heart losing
A sense of touch and smell
These were the dead gifts from someone who said he cared
That I couldn't even feel
Until you came I thought it was murdered that night on my knees.
Now the ink is black little wire forms that crunch
From a keyboard like once these roses dropped their brittle pieces
Onto my paper as I looked for a way to make visual the
Damage that was done to my soul
Just like you have brought black to this moment.
Look here in the garden bed
I walked by the beds this chilly morningSomething beautiful is growing
wrapped in mittens and scarf
Not wanting to think of school
the way there becomes discovering time's meaning
Lingering to check to see what peeks through winter's ground
daffodil or tulip, cracking the frost, it meant the world once
To me.
And there you are at last I found you
poking up to say a 'good morning Sarah
You will never know what that did for me those chilly mornings
going to a place where I was visually lost
And waiting to see your blooms as we sang a morning
song to you was a harmony of spirit
To me.
Bright green with a cup of red
So one day it happened that the simple
stem held up a cup to give me a kiss too.
With two lips of red and a fancy head she shook in the breezes
as I marched in rubber boots into the cloakroom
Thinking of her pretty petals and how I could
probably draw that later at home if I waited
For you.
Tulip opens to the sun.
Does his warmth see her laughing as I go by trudgingSunflower
on the way to schoolish tasks a kid with bookbag and heart
That loves to wander to these tulips
as they usher in my spring
We sang a song each morning in my third grade year
about this flower standing tall
She, us.
Dad grew these behemoths one summer and hung them in the barn
They had been so far above my head I looked up at them as they turned
To see their god sun each day move across our field, that really moved him.
I'd wait to catch them doing it, but it was a slight of head.
Dad showed me, told me of them looking for light and it made the unhappy man laugh
Watching me catching them craning their necks
He cut them and hung them in the barn so heavy with seed
They were falling over outside in the field and rains were threatening
To bring them down to rot, but they were for all the animals to gorge.
We left some out that winter for the birds, putting the heads out on the porch
For our grosbeaks, jays, cardinals, the ones that loved them.
God I loved those sunflowers that were my Dad.
When little I looked up into his sun and moved my head to see
When he was in his fields, in his big unzipped rubber boots
An undershirted round belly moving over his plants
Doing something he loved to do
With his hands in his earth and his mind at peace.
Spiraling in the center of this raw floral beast
Were these times when rafters hung me upside down
Gargantuan beekeepers were surely autumn's mistress
Her trailing seeds fell into our farmyard those years
Raising up step children that grew as our volunteers.
Sunflowers
My sons days
Littered with the shells
Spit out in the anguish
Wrenching at bats
Or flyball to center
Spat as he pitched.
In France I went to Arles
Staying in a farmhouse
Buried in the fields
Of golden sunflowers ripening
The flies descended on us,
Biting black rampant
By the porch we grew
Sunflowers that looked up
Onto the deck through the
Redwood
Not as refined as the clematis
They too were buggy.
It's sizzling my wok
Filled with sunflower oil
And broccoli florets
Making some beef stirfry
For a daughter
Oil from this seedy flower
I taught a unit
Every year about this flower
Planting and watching
It's spiral and heliotropism.
Branded by producers
A worker's flower.
Sunflower
Standing in the sun, a bouquet is gathered in
Set upon a linen skin, in vase that's
Colored blue, slate grey and rose.
Sunflowers are waiting here, still and taken from the gloom
Settled in the drawing room
Awaiting there the one that is to come.
He mixes paint, tries to mark something of their whirling gait
That swirls before his eyes.
Vase of flowers standing still, nothing that connects to real
He pulls his brushes round the forms, inflects a contour
Of music sung, that steps out with a drawing bloom
He moves his dance, the brushes stroke, caressing what is seen
Yellow autumn splashing paint, with center filled with greens and black
The forms are painted with his mark, as if their life flew back,
Still life is representing dream
He turns his canvas to his screen
Revealing veils here never seen, the layers build to mean a whole
The artist transforms the scene, into the lover's eye.
Gladiolus
He said he'd come to dinner
My first for a man
That I ever asked or thought
I wanted
To serve dinner of course
So I made lime jello and it was
Extensive with toasted coconut,nuts and fruit
Dish after dish
Maybe steaks
Bread
And he helped me with the dishes
Standing there
As he washed, I was in love
With these giant green glads
On my table
Making eye contact impossible
It lead to a walk
To walk away all the food
and dessert which was a
White Chocolate cake
We walked to a place to see the lights
Of that town
Sitting down
I laughed at the stalks
in the table
Looking in his eyes
And he gave me a kiss
Quite a few, it was sweeter than the
Gelatin, and I was 21
Forever.
But he said he couldn't hurt me
To explain that was
Not a beginning.
It was just the dinner
I decorated with green glads
Some wine he brought me, a chianti
I set the bookshelf on fire with the candles
But that was later after he went away
That I struggled to stop
the blaze.
On the pond in the country we went to fish blue gills
Russ Ellison was wonderful we'd go out to the ponds
Covered with lily pads, frogs, blooms, the lotus it was outstanding
to get a bamboo pole and pretend with the men that we were fishing
For blue gills in our little metal boat.
I'd get a worm and Dad would put it on the line
Or Russ would tie a fly with my brother, they were more serious
The little fish would nip and get caught but we put them back,
It always seemed to me the hook had to harm them.
But to rest in the lily pad pond on his farm
In West Virginia was an act of beauty
Comparable to the blooms I watched being circled by dragonflies.
Russ said the flowers were for Helen and Mary.
Helen was my kindergarten teacher, his daughter.
Their friendship to my family as the lotus
A symbol for awakening to the spiritual reality of life.
Everything Dies Black Rose
At some point in my days of college my hopes died
On a chilly night drug into a parking lot and made real
As real as it gets the flower of youth
Was dead and left were bones and dust.
So I drew those stiff, dry forms in 7 foot drawings of black
On my knees for them willingly
Not drug there and held by hair and smacked senseless
I drew them crouched with arms and legs smudging
Until as soot they lept off the pages bleeding from my fingers
To be forms of the grief I felt with a heart losing
A sense of touch and smell
These were the dead gifts from someone who said he cared
That I couldn't even feel
Until you came I thought it was murdered that night on my knees.
Now the ink is black little wire forms that crunch
From a keyboard like once these roses dropped their brittle pieces
Onto my paper as I looked for a way to make visual the
Damage that was done to my soul
Just like you have brought black to this moment.
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