Stealing Beauty

I was a child of five: dungareed, frog-small, sun-
dappled by the dandelion clock of summer, when I gifted
my mother with an Oz-ian bouquet; a tumult of dahlias—
scarlet, cerise, sizzling fuchsia, stolen from a neighbor’s
pampered bed, dirt still clinging to the nested roots, dropping
smuts and blots of soil, even the soft pink quirk of a worm,
 
onto her brickwork linoleum. Intoxicated by their beauty
I’d no thought of right or wrong, only a thirst to inhale
all that color, to bury my face in petaled nectar, to bestow them,
like glory, upon Mother. Four decades later and I find I’ve grown
no wiser, once again in someone else’s garden, intent
on my small theft. My walk to the store — abandoned.
 
In the raw half-light of this rain-scented evening, beneath
a cloud cauled sky, I discover destruction.
Only months ago a thousand nodding heads
in resplendent spills, (ruffs and pleats of silken color,)
bloomed here. Now, the clean, white-windowed house
elm-edged, its familiar lawn (more garden plot), is gone.
 
Instead here drifts a scurf of timbered walls, crushed
to chalky dust, flower-beds a muddle of clodded sod.
In the rubble a backhoe hulks: neck-boom cambered,
prehistoric-jaws agape, grit-grimed—ruin’s intent. Of the iris
only stick-like stalks (leaf-fringed) remain.
Tomorrow—they too will be lost.
 
I’ve come upon this, unprepared. No tool to achieve
rescue, I dig my fingers into cold, rough turf,
tear fretted roots to free rhizomes in their luminous sleep.
As many as I can. A maddening urge for rescue bells
in my blood, this need to salvage the coppers, shirred
saffrons, blued-plums lipped in bronze, moon-pale lilacs.
 
Devout as a novitiate, I kneel to gather them, winnow
havoc’s cratered crib for the beauty’s roots. Fingers
stained, nails cracked and torn, my bones iced with ache —
I apron iris in my cotton blouse: these vaults of winged
light waiting, like unplucked harps for April’s contata;
the necromancy of spring