Zinnias

My father’s mother grew a garden of zinnias
to divide the house from the woods:

pop art tops in every color—cream,
peach, royal purple, and even envy

(white-green, I knew, and when the pale
petals opened in early August,

I thought they’d blush like an heirloom
tomato, heir-loom, how strings of wine-dyed

wool lay over the frame of an idea,
how my cheeks look in the mirror

after a run, always the wrong
time of day, thunder rolling around the stadium

of trees, or the sun striking the boughs
with light over and over as though to plead

the green right out of the leaves,
or so it seems to me,

too sensitive, she would say, her love
scientific)—the sunburst petals

a full spectrum except for the sea
returning to you, blue, blue,

the color appearing in language only
when we could know it like a cluster of stars

in the arms of another galaxy
while ours spirals around a black hole,

and now they grow in space, in the satellite
where we live out an idea of permanence

among galactic debris, acquiring stars,
losing vision, the skin touching nothing,

the heads little suns you watch die
on the stem if you want the bloom back.