Before Peonies

Before Peonies

Can one bear it; in nature

from seed to chaff no tragedy?

Folly comes from something---

the present, yes,

we are in it;

it’s the inflection

of things gone...

                                                Robert Lowell

                                                We Took Our Paradise 

It takes, some days, getting up for a second

cup of coffee, going down

into the variegated dark to stub

my toe the way you’d stub

the cigarette you smoked, the coal so

red on the tips of your lips

it looked like you were turning

into a peony right there in front

of me, illuminating your seasonal freckles.

When you exhale and tap it out in the wind
cinders took flight, looked like the last little bits
of snow-globe

snow moments after the shake: little

winged things drifting, purposely,

to the ground.  I was remembering how

I’d read somewhere that the ants

that attend the knuckle, the first

rising up out of the stalk on our varietal
peony, are entirely the point--they soothe the dropsy

oozing through, look how they take it

into their body drop by drop

how they gain each folded petal

to coax out into the ruddy May rain

(it’s been a kind of October spring, won’t you

agree, late days of cold wet sky, and still,

on  the mountains, a couple inches

of snow) don’t they remind you,

those little black ants, of a mother

whose cool palm soothes the baby’s fever?

Wordless the two of them, they each

stand stock still in the black

living room, both exhausted from the heat

and the way it constantly spikes

and then, almost without notice, drops.   

They won’t give up

until it’s all passed through.  They won’t

let go of this moment ever even though

years will spread wide between them

some living vigorous, some dumb

struck with fever.  They don’t and can’t know

how it will all turn.  The instinct

is to brush the bugs off, send them

to the neighbor’s patch of grass.  And if one

crawls up our shirtsleeve don’t we

break into a hilarity of some Saint Vitus

dance until it drops next to the stalk

to take up the job again, when the well-

intended’s back is turned and nature

carries on with her work?  Maybe the peony

will open in a day or maybe it will go
slow, unfolding late 

into next week.  Maybe the glossy

globes of water, aloft on the still

unopened blossom will, but slowly,

slip through just like it had planned all along,

like a coal settling into the ashes,

banked, breathing easy, alive.