Peonies for My Mother

Outside, and near the peonies –
best place to be now, after dinner
on this still staggeringly hot day.

My mother’s spirit hovers
near these lush pink blossoms
though she’s fifteen hundred miles away.
Telling her on the phone about a species
she once cultivated so well – oh, that
will be nice, for she loves to hear me
say whatever I say, but I want to give
her more – of these flowers she loved so.

I can photograph these peonies; I will
tomorrow when the light’s more dramatic
than now at dusk; and Mom will love
the pictures – if all goes well; if
she lives (she’s in no immediate
danger but she is eighty-five); if
I follow through and print them
and mail them. She’ll love that.
She’ll be able to look at the flowers
for hours then, longer surely than I
can stay on the phone telling her
about them.

        Because though she
understands every word when I say
it to her, a minute later she forgets.

Mom, you loved pink peonies, so lush!
The way they burst from their perfect,
tight-packed, green-pink, round-ball buds!
The way the whole huge plant and all
its spectacular foliage grows from
nothing above ground to four feet high
in two Spring months. The way the ants
scamper on the blossoms and buds
(they say the ants are needed to open
the buds – had you heard that?)!

Earlier, I put some of the huge flowers
that were drooping to the ground into
ceramic vases you painted years ago
when that was one of your arts…

Perhaps it’s come to this –
my heart is writing.