Thursday Twofer

                         Cut Flowers

Cut flowers, I will not

bring to your table.

I would rather they hold their place,

in sun and rain, where the wind

finds them out, not on the mantle

or a counter, not in a deep bowl

or narrow vase.

Think me not unkind,

will not does not mean want not.

Your pleasure reaped

by what our hands have planted

doubles then as my joy too.

But something more

there is, I think,

to be honored,

rather than a still life, severed

from where it began,

something of a wildness—

yes, that we share but we cannot tame.

Ladson 2013

    Geography 101

You have become—

we have become—

a geography of a sort,

flagged by Mexican restaurants,

pizza joints, and an ice cream parlor, 

garden centers, push-pinned all—

together, our eyes closed, under evening skies,

even a morning or two or three,

here and there,

or beneath the noontide sun,

our eyes shielded,

we lean in after a meal to say goodbye,

to push off across our little charted piece of this world—

I reach out, sometimes over the front seat console

with my hand, or

as I did so last night while sitting in my recliner,

only to find you not there,

gone now, beyond the edges of my map,

so an unanchoring, this unbounding.

Ladson 2013