(a poem)
Go on Alameda de las
Pulgas for two miles and turn right at the light on Cedar.
Keep going, and when you
see a bunch of naked ladies on your right, you’ll need to...
That’s where people
lose the flow, she amused. Her lovely home in Menlo
To which I flew from the east, visiting my new husband in his
rented student’s room
I woke early, ate her banana bread toasted
twice
And picked tiny bursts of oranges from the spring-cold grove
Jasmines eager for the Indian summer
Open their drowsing faces in the evening
Graceful roses come in spring
Come here, come come!
From far a neighboring auntie called, to fix a rose in my hair
Just as I was rushing for college bus, thinking of all the looks
I was going to get-
I wore a half-sari for the first time at seventeen
Hibiscus opens fresh at dawn, red or pink. Also Parijatha,
white on orange
How come a battle was fought
for this tiny flower? I amused
Oh the pink lilies that kept me company while I wrote my
thesis in a Chicago cold
I wrote Nitrogen and they halfway opened, wanting to know
more
They gave petals, tendrils, pollen and watched while I wrote
papers
A big blue vase, a white vase, some small ones and I even
made some later
Daisies came with the house in the bay and light up every
spring
For my son’s first summer I planted a row of noble sunflowers
Walking along, a look askew and before I knew, my view
was split into two
One is fake and the other is bare
Where only beauty in the bare makes sense, or else it is fake
Flowers stayed beautiful for themselves and my vases walked
to closet
But when California Poppies come in spring
And I spot them on a hillside here or that sidewalk
happenstance
I stop and stare.
Even though one can
never recover from some things in life
Amidst busy feet, from a dusty dry shrub in poor soil in high wind
Comes a burst of 4-petaled orange reaching for life and love
There can be
unimaginable beauty in the absurd, it amuses
And my split vision merges into a new whole, for all the
time I stop and stare
Turn at the light and keep going until you
see a shock of poppy flowers in the front
That’s the house
you’re looking for -I’d like to say directions sometime
Walk the pathway
through the waving orange on green
Come up to door and
come on in, we’ll be inside.
*****
