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Garland
I left a family reunion
at my sister's place
tucked in a valley.
Encircled by horse paddocks
and sky.
Was delayed by a stately
wildflower with white cups
just opened, reaching
out of the weeds
at the end of her road.
Considered it my entrance
back to solitary dinners.
My candled cat-dandered
book-strewn bedroom.
An apartment as hushed
as the grassland music
made by women's shawls
at The Gathering of Nations.
Dancers circling, weaving, parting,
re-uniting.
I drove through cascades
of pines pushing out
of volcanic ash.
Passed rock striations
Red White Red.
Left behind The Largest
Petrified Tree in the World.
In seven hours I was back
in my fenced backyard.
Greeted by tidy mats
of snowcrop, feverfew, cat
mint nibbled to the ground.
My periwinkle Oasis
of a bird bath.
A calendar of museums,
art films, wine tastings, my job.
Salsa Under the Stars.
Bottle Business (for Oz)
On a Thursday afternoon in November,
she attends the garage sale of a robust
eighty year old friend. He's cleaning out
the depository of living & teaching
sixty years in one place.
For over twenty years, she's stayed
in a town she loathes. Her unhappiness
has manifest itself into anger & illness.
Forced her to give up her career.
Famed biologist, he saved a river.
At this sale, there are no exotic artifacts-
only middle-aged men, who are standing patiently
in line to hear her friend's recitation
of the provenance of dozens of bottles.
The bottle she chooses is barely
3 ½ inches tall. Its shape is not delicate.
It's not blue, green, or amber.
She has no trouble imagining her friend
using this bottle to capture water samples
in Zimbabwe or flourishing it in legal battles.
Her friend tells her that most likely this bottle held
a tiny flatworm or invertebrate, ordered from a science
supply house, for daily classroom use.
Each March she will fill this vessel with a flower,
her favorite since childhood, one unassumingly
plain & hardy:
The common wood violet Viola papilionacea.
This poem is dedicated to the incomparable Dr. Oz Hawskley, and, by extension,
Dorothy, who worked just as hard for what she believed in.
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