Gladiolus

Preface: nearly two years ago, my partner and I bought a house together. Both of us first time homeowners, we laboriously moved our collective possessions from at least three different locations into our new home. That Spring, though still in the process of unpacking and organizing, I made it a priority to plant many new plants on the property, still getting to know the land. My crisis of identity came from being a new homeowner with the realization that I was now the keeper of many of my dead relatives’ possessions and found myself accumulating even more from aging relatives in real time as soon as the purchase of my new home was discovered. The crux of the crisis was this: I am now the last of my living familial line. When I pass, who will inherit all of this? What does it mean to have a legacy and do we get to choose the legacy we leave behind? The below poem was originally two poems that I then revised to combine into one; I hope it gets at the heart of those questions, as the answers to them are in themselves a living document that is constantly being combined, edited and re-vamped.

They were my great-aunt Maddy’s

favorite flower.

Their green sprouts in stakes surround the

perimeter of my new house:

Red blooms by the breezeway,

white by the front steps,

yellow for the Middle Ground (but just one),

In-between.

A great-aunt I never met,

Her dining room table overlooks the bay windows that

Overlooks the front flower bed.

A new house, but not new construction,

I try to root it in my bones

Built in 1988, born in 1989,

I fill the bones of my new house

With the possessions of many dead relatives,

The last of a branch;

clutching relics

Like hot marbles.

Outside: the humid gloam of August—

the myst rises on the hill,

boils off blacktops and roots

Inside: the languid wait for the kettle to boil

Over

Skin itching with electricity,

Waiting for huge wet drops

That hit the deck rails

Eaten by carpenter bees

And soak into wood’s dewy skin—

A drip drip

In the ribbit pulse of veins.

In the humid gloam of August

I weed furiously and try to uproot

The bad,

Allow the good to stop choking and

Soak the sunlight.

The deep dirt invades my fingernails and

I allow the high grey sky

and the heat

to sublimate my limbs,

to possum my monkey mind

and collect the neuronal tide.

As many plants live that I plant

Also die.

Chance or circumstance caught

like a fly fish on the line of

epigenetic stress or weather

or a bookmark

in-between pages of

unread generational

tomes.

The rosemary, the butterfly bush and one rose bush of four die. A lemon balm plant dies while another thrives.

I weed the weeds choking the khal lilies,

who have shot up since Midsummer

protected by their stronger companions—tall ones who stretch Icarus arms—now these shielded protégés behind them

Can’t breathe—

I rip the centipede grass surrounding them

Violently from its roots

II

Here is the pressure cooker

of today

knowing that the end of the line

meets unsung songs

unread lines

that will

sing

words

for

no

one.

But so much of history

is the attempt of some

people to convince

other people

to keep their families’ alive

and archived

But archives

can cost a pretty penny

when nations can’t always agree

on the price

of history

But today I’ll eschew history

and take you,

Oh Yellow One,

Oh In-Between One,

in these living hands—

Small, frail and often

Unable to open

New

Things