Before Peonies

Before Peonies

It takes, some days, getting another second

cup of coffee, going down

into the variegated dark to stub

my toe the way you’d stoke

the stove, the coals so

red at the tips of your fingers

it looked like you were blooming

into a peony right there in front

of me.  Your seasonal freckles were illuminated

when you’d lifted and tapped the poker above

the lid and cinders took flight, looked like

the last little bits of snow-globe

snow moments after the shake: little

winged things drifting with purpose

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 them 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 night both exhausted from the heat

the defeat of it and the constant way it spikes

an eruption, blooms hives on his skin,

and then, almost without notice, drops.   Neither

baby nor mother will give up

until it’s all passed through.  And they won’t

let go of this moment ever even though

years will spread wide between them

some living vigorous, some awe

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 (I did

once) break into the tremor 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 easier now after

such a fever, easy and, we’re so glad, alive.