I’ve been waiting for something,
A gobsmacking something
To buoy me aloft out of the drift,
Out to the edges of reckoning,
Out of the tangle of stories not lived but imagined.
I’ve been waiting for something
To rake the mundane grasses of my mind
Into a pompadour;
To lift my beach chair with helium balloons
And sail it through butter cream clouds.
I’ve been waiting for something
That makes me feel again…to see differently…
To leap my heart into the jaws of a coyote,
Onto the snout of a crocodile,
Ah, to be the ox-pecker on the rhino’s back.
Passing an ordinary fruit stand ,
I saw plants: hanging baskets of strawberries,
Bright geraniums in carnival clothes, gaudy petunias..
And then from the corner, near the edge
I heard my name called.
It was a climbing rose tree.
Fat blossoms…like washes of sunset,
Magenta flounces lined with creamy charmeuse,
Leaves glossy as a beetle’s back.
Not a nibble or a blemish to say it was real.
An infant, I thought, needing protection
From the barbarous life of a garden.
And bowing my head with a mother’s instinct,
I heard the whisper again. “ Take me home.
Carry my in your arms on the bus…”
“Take me home and dig for me a hole of sod
And I will be your something.
I will perfume your life,
I will teach you, stretch you.
I will shake you like the jaws of the coyote.
And for the kindling of the
Simple joys that stirred within…
I promised, “ I will.”
Mary Payne : June 2021
