The magnolia tree is dead or dying
Said the experts at the nursery
Which planted it.
No green leaves hang upon it,
Only these brittle, brown things
Cling to its limbs still.
The experts give me two things,
Free of charge of course,
To try to resuscitate my magnolia.
The experts tell me everything to do
Over the next eight weeks,
But not to worry, if it all doesn’t work,
The tree will be replaced. It’s guaranteed.
A guarantee I never thought I’d need.
I did everything right:
Watering and fertilizing,
Watering and fertilizing,
Factoring in all the rain—
Yet here it stands dead or dying
In this place you never knew.
Like with you, in the place you knew,
I did everything I knew to do—
Replace the cooking pots and pans with stainless,
Only organic foods, red wine the only alcohol,
Broke all the cigarettes in two,
Quit my job to care for you—
Until—
Until the fourth time it returned,
Spread to the lungs and liver,
You wanted your cigarettes and alcohol back.
How could I argue? Say no to that?
Yet even then—
I found you cigarettes with no additives, organic tobacco too.
Until January, our magnolia bloomed as you lay dying,
When at midnight a storm blew through,
Minutes later, you died
And the magnolia shed its blooms.
So here now, in this new place,
I planted a magnolia in memory
Of what was, what was not,
Of what could have been, should have been,
Of what would have been
If I possessed the magic to shape shift
Into the one you most wanted.
And now, this tree in this new place
Stands dead or dying.
But I will do as the experts say:
Spray from top to bottom for disease,
Shock the roots every other week
Until mid- November, hoping to bring it back,
Bring it back from the edge of death.
If I can’t, the nursery will replace it
With another magnolia tree.
Yet I must think on that.
In this place, in this soil, perhaps
A magnolia is not meant to be.
I may ask them to replace it
With a different tree.
For it could be,
That here and now,
Magnolias are no longer meant for me.
Caught in the evening downpour,
I am washed clean of summer.
Summer’s red rock, red dirt dreams
Sluiced from me with this autumnal drenching.
Morning greets me with a cool hand
Of sunshine upon my brow.
Autumn whispers of a harvest
Under skies of bluest topaz.
A clear, clean, honest reaping
In days yet to be had.
I gather hardened scars of loss and damage Braided into keloid beauty That are not blossoms of bitterness, But fragrant beauties That make me who I am. Even the bars of your barren garden Called love could not steal away The essence of my hope. Instead, the black, barrenness within sugar syrup words Of one never able to love Contain no acid To eat away My skin of hope.
Pulled my anchor from this harbor Years ago. Yet the current pulls me back, Some irritant speck, Yet to yield a pearl, In the soul, Some rough edged Needless need chafes away Until confession is made And a pilgrimage to graves Must be paid—
There is no why to this– This steel wrought laundry list To be run down and checked through
A visit, a meal eaten At the landmark restaurant, Where new owners chiseled hieroglyphics over a history of years when the landmark lived across A narrow brick paved street And my family lived upstairs, Erasing my mother’s sacrifice Of bloody fetal tissue, My fraternal twin, On the bathroom floor there While I hung on to be born. But such bloody sacrifice Doesn’t sell cheeseburgers, Greek salads, and over easy eggs, A fairytale of family ownership- Sells well and makes for spots On reality television shows.
A drive by the childhood home, Sentimentality at its highest, Revisit the torture chamber It became— A wooden yardstick and when it broke, A metal one I had to buy to be taken Across my back by a drunken mother Until the skin broke open to bleed. . Why the drive by? Who the hell knows? When all I’d like to see Is it all disappear—
Then the statue of Christ In Hopkins Hospital lobby, a must see. Where I stood as a teen Confessing the darkest Thing upon my soul— A part of me wishing My mother had died In that surgery of fifteen hours The other part thanking Jesus she had lived.
Then the graves, To place some flowers, Talk a bit to the air, Turn my soul inside out To find it dusty and dirty again. We can think our souls clean Until turning them inside out— That is where we find the grime Of all the living done.
I visit my brothers, The man who was my real father, Then on to the man I thought was, And then my mother, The saint she was, The monster she became. At her grave, my soul aches the most, Tweezing thorns left from her old rose bushes and my own, Turning itself inside out, Leaving all the grime and dirt behind, Or so it feels.
Then on to visit with what is left of the living. And though, I love the living, There is little, so little– To charm me into staying. But the currents, the tides Of some blood element, Like an ancient memory, Bring me back From time to time.
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Hearing The Mermaids Sing 