Planting Bulbs in a Time of War, and Other Poems

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From the book:

October 2001

A morning for choices: bed,
the muzzy drone of half-sleep,
the sinking heart-or instead, thick socks,
rubber clogs, a sharp trowel in gloved hands,
the garb of earth's midwife.

Out under the struggling sun, the lifting breeze,
you bend to work, a swarm of lady-bugs
clings to the porch door; beyond
the dying tomatoes, sumac warms
the field of fading goldenrod.
Hunkered on rain-damp ground,
deep into each hole you've dug
you press one bulb, tear-shaped;
like the ancient Egyptians
leaving the dead food for the journey,
you scatter bone ground fine as ash.

Last night with fierce surprise
you found yourself calling down
from the pale stars your parents,
as if this time they'd enter their lives
capable of comforting, but really
what you ached for was just a chance
to ask, before dark fell, for one
last story, the one you never thought
you'd need to hear:

What was it like
when a moment arrived--like a fingertip
held to a pulse--when a hawk's shadow
dropped over the day? Afterward then,
still childless, apart, did each of them dare
to conjure a future that one day arrived?--
a station platform, a baby whose picture
they'd pose atop a globe of the world,
then print up for cards at Christmas.

And here you still are this morning, still riding
that spinning world, the sun your incantation,
after so many burials ready to catch,
when it comes--as it must--the howling
spring, writing the story yourself, not
the final chapter but the next, deep under
your broken fingernails
ashes and dirt.