Reflections on Some Drawings of Plants

I can in groups these mimic flowers compose,

  These bells and golden eyes, embathed in dew;

Catch the soft blush that warms the early Rose,

  Or the pale Iris cloud with veins of blue;

Copy the scallop’d leaves, and downy stems,

  And bid the pencil’s varied shades arrest

Spring’s humid buds, and Summer’s musky gems:

  But, save the portrait on my bleeding breast,

I have no semblance of that form adored,

  That form, expressive of a soul divine,

  So early blighted, and while life is mine,

With fond regret, and ceaseless grief deplored—

  That grief, my angel! with too faithful art

  Enshrines thy image in thy Mother’s heart.

I saw then the white-eyed man

leaning in to see if I was ready

yet to go where he has been waiting

to take me. I saw then the gnawing

sounds my faith has been making

and I saw too that the shape it sings

in is the color of cast-iron mountains

I drove so long to find I forgot I had

been looking for them, for the you

I once knew and the you that was born

waiting for me to find you. I have been

twisting and turning across these lifetimes

where forgetting me is what you do

so you don’t have to look at yourself. I saw

that I would drown in a creek carved out

of a field our incarnations forged the first path

through to those mountains. I invited you to stroll

with me there again for the first time, to pause

and sprawl in the grass while I read to you

the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting

to hear. I read until you finally slept

and all your jagged syntaxes softened into rest.

You’re always driving so far from me towards

the me I worry, without you, is eternity. I lay there,

awake, keeping watch while you snored.

I waited, as I always seem to, for you

to wake up and come back to me.

The universe breathed through my mouth

when I read the first chapter of patience.

I held the book away from my body

when the illustrations became life-like:

the kite flew over the grass, a child tumbled

down a hill and landed at the mouth of neon waters.

The fox curled into itself under the tree

and an eagle parted the sky like the last curtains.

I found myself wandering the forest, revising

the stories as I worked the heavens.

I lived inside the candied house

and hung the doors with sweetness.

I devoured the windows and I was greedy.

With all this sugar, I still felt trapped.

I sought to change the moral

so I filled my baskets daily with strawberry,

thorn, and vine, piled my home

with pastries and the charge of regret.

I placed those regrets inside the oven

and watched the pie rise. I wanted

everything in the pie and yearned

all the discarded ingredients.

I kept myself in the kitchen for years.

Everything up in smoke and yet my apron

was pristine, my hair done just right.

You can say it was perfection, a vision

from the past, waving a whisk through a bowl

as if it were a pitchfork. When I left the house

made of confection, that’s when I began to live,

for everything I gave up was in that house.

I remember you there. Your fingerprints vaguely

visible in the layer of flour on the table.

Smiling dolly with the eyes of blue,

Was it lovely where they fashioned you,

Were there laughing gnomes, and did the breeze

Toss the snow along the Christmas trees?

Tiny hands and chill, and thin rags torn,

Faces drawn with waking night and morn,

Eyes that strained until they could not see,

Little mother, where they fashioned me.

Gold-haired dolly in the silken dress,

Tell me where you found your loveliness,

Were they fairyfolk who clad you so,

Gold wands quivering and wings aglow?

Narrow walls and low, and tumbled bed,

One dim lamp to see to knot the thread,

This was all I saw till dark came down,

Little mother, where they sewed my gown.

Rosy dolly on my Christmas tree,

Tell the lovely things you saw to me,

Were there golden birds and silver dew

In the fairylands they brought you through?

Weary footsteps all and weary faces

Serving crowds within the crowded places,

This was all I saw the Christ-eve through,

Little mother, ere I came to you. 

Smiling dolly in the Christmas-green,

What do all these cruel stories mean?

Are there children, then, who cannot say

Thanks to Christ for this his natal day?

Ay, there’s weariness and want and shame,

Pain and evil in the good Lord’s name,

Things the peasant Christ-child could not know

On his quiet birthday long ago!

O day—if I could cup my hands and drink of you,

And make this shining wonder be

A part of me!

O day! O day!

You lift and sway your colors on the sky

Till I am crushed with beauty. Why is there

More of reeling sunlit air

Than I can breathe? Why is there sound

In silence? Why is a singing wound

About each hour?

And perfume when there is no flower?

O day! O Day! How may I press

Nearer to loveliness?

Tomato pies are what we called them, those days,

before Pizza came in,

at my Grandmother’s restaurant,

in Trenton New Jersey.

My grandfather is rolling meatballs

in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but

saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy

by coming to America.

Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce.

Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean,

sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after

cops delivered him home just hours before.

The waitresses are helping

themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer,

playing the numbers with Moon Mullin

and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942,

tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents.

With anchovies, large, 50 cents.

A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm).

How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix,

would stand outside all the way down Warren Street,

waiting for this new taste treat,

young guys in uniform,

lined up and laughing, learning Italian,

before being shipped out to fight the last great war.