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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3989 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me Nellie Melba (Lorin Ford) (a response to Grant Caldwell’s ’I am not the trick of the flower’) Here come the first buds of quince again, random swellings in the thicket of twigs she didn’t prune midwinter. It’s too late now. She’s smoking again, outside in the cold with her arthritis and broken wrist. She’s thinking of Blake and his priests in the garden, his invisible worm and how even now, under quince bark that loosens and wrinkles like skin, codling moth worms, worse than sperm of dragons, sleep ’til blossom fall, then wake, unerring, to pierce green beginnings and instil decay. This year will she spray the tree with poison, try to save the fruit? Or will the season pass like all the other seasons when she sat and brooded and didn’t get ’round to it? Bees are already there at the fruity sage, whose deep-throated blooms shout hot pink early, a jump ahead of the spring competition, when every flower’s doing it. She thinks: how the open beaks of hatchlings reveal a pattern that parent birds can’t resist; how last night’s new chanteuse took the prize, who’d sung her verses to the judges (men, dreaming in their fifties); how nature uses youth so why shouldn’t youth use nature and if only she’d been wise to this before she lost the trick of the flower. |
