Hydrangeas
There is a logic to forgetting,
A method to unhappiness.
Each day you pick
Hydrangeas, their name
Water and angels,
Liquid innocense itself,
Resting heavy on their boughs,
Bowed to the ground like arms.
You once watched your mother
Carefully hold the stems,
Her face placid and staid,
Fingers white against the green
As she syringed a flash of azure
Into the ground at each root
Until they blossomed like oceans
Filling the yard, painfully blue,
The scent as heady as your
Mother's perfume, the color of her eyes.
How sad, you thought, to be so
Transformed you hardly knew yourself,
So heavenly and unnatural,
Your own skin smooth and pale
The lines running blue beneath it,
Familiar as breath.
How sad they bloom still
In that yard even now,
Forgetting whiteness,
As you've forgotten your mother's smile
The dark wing of her hair,
The house hushed, the windows darkened,
The scent a violent sadness.
Appeared in Moon Journal Spring/Summer 2002.
