The Gaping Trellis
Cigarette burns on drab naugahyde
and a fridge full of cakes announced
Grandpa’s sclerotic death and my
lonely sojourn in yet another foreign home,
filled with empty days on a backyard stoop,
caged by ladders and limbs and the slime
of birdbaths amassing startled buckeyes
that peered through frowzy leaves,
when up from the blackened snow,
Grandma Daisy rose,
scary as she could always be,
fingers piercing the soil, greenly
inviting themselves to the graves
of memorial-day mothers,
each scarlet blade pushing up
to then abandon a heart
and scream the shock of shades:
a taste of the long-buried corpse
that left those roses to climb
the thrilling lattice all alone
and this tuliped and peonied fare
to fill my seven-summered platter.
Still now my perennial studies
of redolent buds and sprouts
glimmer with those bird-bathed evening songs
and dawn’s silvering breath of magnolia blooms,
yet unknown the anxious wait to see
if daisies will ever again come
leap out and touch me.
