Walking the farm and all these flowers I hadn’t seen before
and each one so different from the one before when I thought they were the same kind.
The sun beating down but he didn’t notice.
He doesn’t know yet how to pull from the bottom of the stem.
Flower bouquets like water-lilies floating in a jar in our kitchen.
Two moon rocks, Henry says.
In this pile of rocks Stephen has collected from the garden –
one small pile among many nearby,
some sorted for their beauty –
two rocks that Stephen painted with glow-in-the-dark paint last year.
They still glow, as does a section of the sweatshirt he wears when it gets cold,
a smear I saw last night right by his heart.
(this website format makes for long, short photo-viewing, but the image itself is always taller. click it to see. or else the stripes don’t hang, see.)
The sandpiper I thought was sick beside the bleached root
but it disappeared.
The Canadian Goose egg the gun dog took and abandoned
cracked open and it looked just like a goose, its long neck
that the dog rolled in and that I buried this morning,
little beak, long limp neck, tiny body curled and gray-pink.
The yellow bird outside the window as I woke.
The feeling inside upon waking like a storm had cleared, pink-cheeked, pink-sky.
No lucky pennies.
The ultrasound screen murky like someone else’s dream
as the doctors pointed, mumbled.
The sky hearkening, clouds trumpeting.
The blackberry bush suddenly blooming, tiny green flower-crowns.
The blackberry bush blooming by the squished frog on the driveway.
Thinking i might die and seeing the tremendous sky.
Photographing the garden, the sunset’s gasoline halos on my son.
The clouds arcing around our house, the climax at the tallest trees, like a cloud halo.
The placenta a halo; the baby’s head, not-yet-crowning, a halo.
The rainbow that looked like it ended at our farm as we drove home:
trying to show it to the boy, he moved his arms like we did,
pointing and arcing his finger around the sky
but admitting to finding nothing but clouds.
The red-winged blackbird so close.
Another rainbow, thin and pale and off-center.
Clouds hooped like mountains where I come from, not where I’m going.
In the chaos of moving we brought bouquets of tulips with us.
I asked for no one to throw away the fallen petals even though what we do is move boxes and organize toys.
I have dusted around the petals for weeks.
Needing beauty.
Someone asked tonight why we moved to the farm (Are you a country bumpkin or something?)
What I said is I’m an aesthete.
I choose beauty over people
(not that people aren’t beautiful, but I want to fall asleep feeling the sublime, the stars all around me).
(In the middle of the night I awake to thunder.
With each lightning bolt I cover the baby’s ears so he does not wake,
praying that he does not wake.
He does not wake.
Two air fronts touch one another.
The thunder feels both close and high above our heads like God.)
When Stephen put the temporary greenhouse right in our line of sight from the farmhouse I was at first bothered.
That’s my view.
But the shape now! Like a white ghost diamond. Reflecting blue when the evening does.
It feels holy: something important should happen at its top point.
All vantage points arrive there, clothesline-to-tree-horizon-to-north-star.
Wise men will come bearing gifts.
I’ve been told not to lift anything heavier than my toddler for the past two and a half weeks, all while trying to move from our humble house in town to our rustic farm house. Boxes everywhere, and he’s lifted all of them. Laundry up and down the stairs: he’s lifted all that, too. Organized cabinets, built shelves, moved furniture. And done intensive work in the garden in a gardener’s busiest time of year, digging trenches and hauling away dirt and hauling in more nutrient-dense dirt. Planting and transplanting, emerging from the rain or heat or whatever catapulting weather the day brings with so much dirt on his skin it looks painted.
And then he reads to our two-year-old, bathes him, and lies with him until he is, or they both are, asleep. Purplicious.
