I did not know how to care for them, the amaranth
growing tall and impossible on my back patio
ignorant of their name the first half of the summer,
I carted them home, delighting in the violet globes
of their bodies, leggy and proud. All season
I watered them sporadically, tripping over mother
nature – they whiled July away, together with their
waterlogged neighbors: the geraniums, petunias, begonias
and zinnias. The tiny mums gave up and died, zipping
their vibrant magenta mouths tight in soggy brown buds.
When the rains came, day after day after day,
the hollyhocks laid down and died. I cut their stems
in silence. The earth damp beneath my bare feet.
Their pink and red dresses a crush of crinoline
and crepe, the soft wing of a monarch drowned
in a glass of champagne. Oh, how their crimson hearts
bled – so, too, the peonies. Briefly, they greeted me –
great magenta bulbs drooping under their own weight;
then went the poppies, the lily. Even the spruce tree.
All summer, I waited for summer to die.
I did not gather the lavender but let it wild out front and
behind the garage. There was no space in me to nurture
a root torn from its mother, no patience to tend to the house
plants murdered by their offspring. When they died, I
threw them out, pots and all. Liberating us both from sorrow.
Somehow I am still alive this autumn, and the sedum
is still peopled by honeybees and late monarchs whose drunk
bodies blur in a sky where the moon is a hoop or scythe
depending on how you look at it. The sparrows eat
and eat. Soon they will depart, and one day I will wake
to their absence, the absolute silence after a summer
of chatter. Perhaps then I will find respite from this grief
which hollows me, an ache that is ice splintering
the moment a foot eases onto it, delicate as a reed.
The amaranths are dead. I collected their dry heads
in my hands. All those days I left them to sun and rot
and earwigs. Why is it I am always crying? They
can’t hear me. Already they are beyond my weeping.
