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Sunflowers grew so tall in the Coshburns’ garden,
ten, twelve feet before a night windstorm
flattened them, decapitating some
(whose heads we found floating in the road,
and dangling from the wire mesh of a rabbit warren),
they frightened us ... as if they were children who become
adults too soon, the darkness at their roots
sensed by other children—as I remember
sensing the coming beauty of Nancy Parker,
the death of Billy Meade.  The sunflowers
grew uglier and uglier, a dozen higher ones
with faces descending at us from between
invisible shoulders, faces grotesquely swaying
on horrible stalks.  And yet the Coshburns
seemed not to notice.  Blithely, they beckoned us
closer and closer.  Look up and see the sun,
they said.  Don’t you wish that you and you
could grow so tall.  The night they fell,
moths bumped our windowscreens, the radio
went static, then dead.  My mother screamed
at her clothesline.  From the upstairs porch
of our summer cottage, lightning serifs melting
all over the sky, I watched the Coshburns’ garden
as the sunflowers, one by one, went down,
splayed like compass points; and I was glad
the forces beyond us were protecting us
even in the small towns of upstate New York,
in 1945, in that hot war-torn July.

from The Day Before: New Poems (Sarabande Books)



African Violets
                    What child
                            Doesn’t long to think itself loved best?

I’ve always despised them, these madly blooming
things in their little orangeish pots along the windowsills
of my mother’s bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, living room,
with their peaty smell of damp earth, their little
caved-in flower faces that always reminded me
of children in some Dickens story begging
Please, Sir, a ha’penny, Sir.  Please.  I’ve always
despised their creepy caterpillar-furry hairy leaves,
their flimsy little stalks 
like over-cooked strands of angel-hair spaghetti. 
What are they, after all?  Bane of cats
wishing to nibble their petals to death, 
false promises of horticultural success
since almost anyone can grow them, even those
who failed with begonias, went down to defeat
with every other houseplant in the universe;
no wonder I always tried, surreptitiously, to over-water, 
overfeed, overheat, overturn them, 
and like the cats who craved their sunny windowsills,
knock them off their pedestals. “My babies, my precious ones,” 
my mother called them, fluttering her fingers over each,
gushing, even as they overran our house,  “Darlings!  Darlings!” 
And how they ate it up!  Preening, self-important as a tiny blog
or list-serve in some obscure corner of the Internet,
over-propagating,  squirming in their pots, 
their Disney mouse-ear petals fluttering,
they danced with purple glee, they gorged, they rioted
until she died,
and I dethroned their urine-sucking butts,
then joyously threw all those bastards out.

first published in Plume


​
Black-eyed Susans

       
Here they come again, traipsing
over meadows and fields,
trailing the borders of our neighbors’ gardens,
cartwheeled

into the green apron of every summer,
their dark domed eyes
all wide open,
unapprised

(as they waver under our mailbox,
scatter their different heights across our yard)
that lives longer than theirs
are hard, hard,

and where Susans cavort and flaunt
bright yellow rays,
late November storms will suicide,
minds will cave.

But now, how intrepidly
they flourish, they mutate, they imprint the retina:
Bambi, Toto, Yellow Daisy,
Small Gloriosa.

from This Shadowy Place (St. Augustine’s)