but now I know a mother can work in her garden for ten hours,
not know it’s her last day alive. Now I know
no one’s there to deadhead the zinnias
and the fever few. Even though the world is filled
with injured geese and gulls, millions of acres
of smoldering trees,
I still love cantaloupe, how it sits on the kitchen counter
waiting for my spoon to scoop its firm and juicy flesh.
Even after I saw a photo
of my mother’s casket draped with one of her mother’s quilts,
I still loved hearing about the field of white daisies
down the road from her grave.
The world is both the wheat plowed under to make way for strip malls,
and a sunset like spilled orange juice above a gray lake.
Joy resides in the mountains
of Styrofoam and Ziplocs, while sorrow suffuses my mother’s backyard,
its cardinals and finches, its hummingbird perched in a plum tree
that lost nearly all its branches in a terrible storm.
