False Promise on Petals
For Morgan Bell
‘Train your eye
slalom through sunset webs
Learn quickly.’
Gillian Swain, “Garden Poem”
Evening pours in
taking everyone by surprise.
It’s always the way
heavy and wet, dirt flowing
like everything you ever needed
but too much all at once
the zucchinis are King Midas
withering in their own liquid gold
potatoes are corrupted, their broken bodies
purple gemstones, bleeding into the earth
cucumbers fall too early off the vine, nourishing
only thriving fungus in mottled shades of grey.
I am also bleeding in, my body in a state
of change, loosened by deluge.
I have always been rain, a false promise
petal softness, cascading down down
into roots dissolving.