Monday morning in mid-May
we wake to find our prize array
of pink and gold tulips
lambasted by a tyrant frost
whose stealthy Sunday night blitzkrieg
left their innocent heads
mangled in sickening starbursts
that remind me in fits and starts
of the urban bombings I keep
hearing about in Riyadh and the Gaza Strip.
Some, magically, still stagger
in the breeze, stares as blank as sunlight
in the shrapnel of cedar chips.
You are not consoled
by my allusions to Pope’s
crucial Essay on Criticism
and gardening in the eighteenth century,
how the labor of planting
is its own sustenance
for the soul. Invariably,
nature prunes us, I say,
and you answer that it nevertheless
amounts to time wasted,
that your hands feel useless
now. The thought I don’t share:
In November, when we tucked
them into sockets of cramped soil, it struck
me as both birth and burial there.
Later, I shuttle our two oldest girls
to their dress rehearsal
at Dance Unlimited, kittycorner
across the alley from Lorin’s Auto Repair,
and watch them tighten up
the step-ball-changes in
a hopped up Little Richard’s “Hokey Pokey.”
The studio’s décor is low key
kitsch, brash mauve and turquoise
walls bearing Degas reprints
and Gertrude K'sebier black and whites.
Our second oldest, who pranced
into our lives unplanned, comes in
ten steps too soon
for “Bop ‘Til You Drop”
on a sickle breeze of petal-red leotards
and pigtails, the hardy bulb
of her girlhood already cached
sans rites in the earth’s vault, stashed
along with the mass graves
of souls in Kosovo and Mazar-e-Sharif
who wait in black fifth position
to rise and traipse across time
on tiptoe to boogie to “Musicbox Dancer”
with the woman our girl will be,
her haggard head arching naturally
toward the everlasting stems of light
in an elegant query,
joining us with useful hands
in killing the things we bury.
