| Late May, when the daffodils droop their
leaves,
seed pods grow bulbous misshapen green
upon their stalks, but not in affluent suburbia.
There where white fingered housewives
pick over the beds, pulling weeds from lives,
the fruity pods are pinched off before they form.
All across America where men go to work
in the morning the work goes on unknown to poets.
Not noticed by accurate accountants, leering lawyers,
the women pinch growth back to build the bulbs,
to rebuild the roots that reach into their garden soil.
An accountable nation does not need to know,
because the bulbs grow each spring and spread
from one small clump to edge to edge within the bed,
their heads and seed picked clean as incest,
kept in control, stone sterile, protected in white fenced
centers,
yet still reproducing in erotic flagrance on their own.
Strange, wild mementos from Wordsworth's dreams
reproducing either way, but this the way we like it best.
And with help each plant pleases only itself, grows hard,
beneath the surface only, alone in the dark, reproduces and
goes on.
As the men come and go in suburbia only the gardener knows,
and the reproduction of ideas, the interdependencies of seed
that bring flexibility are choked off to build upon the known. |
