7 October 2022 – Today I learned:
That I wrote this poem a few years ago, but I had completely forgotten about it.
This evening, looking for some gardening quotes, I opened a file in Google Drive called “Tell About Night Flowers,” thinking it was something I created to keep notes from the Eudora Welty book of letters with that title, which I’d read (some of it anyway) online over 2-1/2 years ago. Instead, I opened a poem I’d written in March 2020. I was happy to see it again.
Tell About Night Flowers I don’t think it’s morbid to watch a strand of my drifting white hair -- removed from my shirt and dropped on the hot woodstove’s dark griddle -- wither to ash, to dust, or neither but more an absence of the little that was, leaving behind first a wiry trace, then nothing remains on the stove though I see yet a persistent shadow of its shape, and to remember that this is what it will be like for my whole body, including hair if there is hair left, and eyes, when the time comes. Earlier, I was reading Eudora Welty’s letters to her agent and his to her about gardening, about camellias growing in February 1942 in Jackson, Mississippi, the tender buds that if touched fell to the ground, bloomless, and her dream in April of an iris floating in front of her, emanating qualities like colour, form, fragrance in fainter and fainter images, trailing off into space. © M Wms 2020
One comment