DANCING WITH BOUGANVILLA
by Erin Elizabeth Muir
dawn on Sunday
:
did you know that in the morning,
free of human urgency,
flowers of the city
have a different vibrancy?
I don’t know how to say it quite so
because we all know the
bloom is when the fragrance is
when the bloom is when the…
but in this quietude
the flowers are
brighter, sharper, clearer
(I’m not even wearing my glasses)
so I begin to look at all the
plantlife
and it’s not just the flowers!
the trees are deeper
and the palm fronds are at once
full of a certain
sorrow one might never notice
when the mad human traffic,
disconnected, hurried
is too busy ignoring the sway
forth and back
at one with the ways of nature
sweet, and joyfully sad
but not in a melodrama, no.
like most of us, not actually native to America,
brought here to pursue an ancestor’s dream of
manifest destiny,
the distinction is that, well,
my fellow, the palm tree,
he gets the way it is and
that the way it is
carries all things both happy and-
not so.
now I sit and look out my window.
a slight dew and a
new crop of pink flowers:
my own basil plant in the sill
has pressed his lucky few leaves up
against the pane and
seems to be dancing with the Bouganvilla
These things,
these and so many other things
I wish I could whisper in your ear,
and then pause, listen while you tell me,
in your arrhythmic way, and I will learn about
what you have seen.
but you are not here so
instead I
am
dancing with the Bouganvilla.
