what we plant

Lately I keep noticing an apartment building on the way to work that boasts not one, but several huge hibiscus bushes. Huge not only in the size of the bush, but huge in the size of the flowers--big as dinner plates and an absolutely gorgeous mix of reds and pinks. It's like this almost every summer--those enviable blooms, though I have no idea how those bushes survive Chicago winters. My mother, once having possesssed hibiscus that was the fussiest thing in the world. More of a small tree than an bush proper, she'd move it from room to room--one too hot, one too cold.  It occasionally could summer outside, but would have to be retrieved if too chilly. It would be bloomless and on the verse of dying, only to come back, full force in a flurry of flowers that lasted a few days then littered the rug around it. It always seemed like a plant that did not quite belong in the midwest at all, and really should have been overlooking some gorgeous Hawiian waterfall and not in our living room.  She'd nurse it back to health when it got really sad looking, and it lasted for years, always in the wrong climate until she finally left it outside too late one fall and it died completely.   Somehow, that sad tree/bush is a poem in and of itself. 

It's been on my mind, since we have a been stuck in a very tropical sort of hot this past weekend (which is not strange for us, but due to climate change, the whole country is suffering much the same fate.) Last night, there were storms and funnel clouds to the west, but all we got in the city was a couple downpours of short duration and maybe a tiny bit of thunder. At some point, I was waiting for rain, and the sky was this yellow as the sun set and absolutely still.  Tornado weather for sure, just not here.  On the phone, my dad watches the sky and  talks about tomatoes. With the exception of one year a while back where the plants all died, he gets an influx that's always a little overwhelming. Without my mom to help. his ability to can them into salsa is slower moving--a fight to keep them from going bad before he has a chance to do something with them.  Meanwhile, here in the city, I buy disappointing tomatoes delivered in my weekly grocery haul. My BLT's are never as tasty as his, but still I try.    The yellow sky that badly wants to break into a storm, is also a poem. The tomatoes, both his and mine,  are a poem.    

I've been working on the spell poems again this week, and I finally have a feel for the direction they are going and how I might like to finish them.  There's a clip to the rhythm of the poems when I'm writing them that is new. Or feels new.  I try not to let wanderings slow them down.  Last week, I sent some of the more polished ones off to a couple journals, one by invitation, the other a place I've been trying to get into for awhile. Despite my waffling in late July, I've sent a few thing out, from this project and another more complete one, and it feels good, to plant those seeds that might bloom later on. The poems are already poems, obviously but so is the planting.---the process and yeild a poem.  Or maybe less like planting a seed intentionally in any given place and more like scattering them to wind. 

In my daily readings for the Sealey challenge, I feel like the words of others often unlocks my own words a bit, and in many ways, prepare the soil for things to happen. Maybe not now, maybe in another batch of poems entirely, particularly the books this week that I am revisiting for the first time in over a decade. These poets voices, who influenced so much my own, influence it in different ways now, perhaps. Most of these poets have moved on to their own new writing styles.  Planted new crops and flowers over the old. But occasionally, you'll shuffle the soil and the old growth is still there. I flipped through the fever alamanac last night, read a couple of my own buried poems, and sure enough I feel their echos even in this new work.

Maybe its late summer, with harvest season so close and the days a smidge shorter that has me thinking in planting metaphors--such a stereotypical poet thing to do. I write more in the winter, no doubt, but so many poems--especially the early ones--take place in the summertime world.  But that slipping away, itself, is such a goddamn poem it makes my chest ache a little every time it happens.