Tulip Heaven

The old man next door had perished from sepsis of the bowels
but his wife, unmoved by loss, still brought the groceries home,
replaced the motion lights on the garage, and mowed instead,
and around their house replaced the flowers with plastic ones:
and who would recognize them as plastic from this pretty distance?

And who would know that when the water from the gutters pooled
into their cups, the waters of the world could neither quicken
nor bend them: though immortality, naturally, came with a price.
So the Indus, the Danube, and the Androscoggin all schemed
and none of them, none ever washed them away, the cups intact,

while the mulch, pungent as Buffalo chips, washed into gutters
with rivers of the world atomized into a single cumulo-nimbus cloud
that, spirited from Canada to Westbrook, expired in a silver shower.

On the stump of their final tree glittered a handful of party favors
their grandchildren had planted in the split alongside loose ribbons.
Their pinwheels twirled as frantically as weathervanes in wheat.
Twirl on, to compensate your tree that will never grow again.

And sometimes, when the wind whips up, and they twirl that way,
a loose beagle, distempered and skittish, will roam the yards,
barking at the neighbors, especially with the coming of a storm.
And when that happens the whole world seems to be a carnival.
that at will produces Dorothy from Kansas and Toto in a shack.
The motion lights turn on as wind whips the maples to a frenzy.

But there would always be tulips in the yard. Though faded,
call them classics if you will, as from enough distance for awe,
you couldn’t see that the siding was vinyl. That was his idea,
although he is a box of ashes. And to no one’s knowledge,
they have not been misplaced. They are not on the mantle though–
there are no fireplaces. I should know, they’re my neighbors.
And they can’t be in the garage: that would be sacrilege.
Ditto the basement: too much water condensation. But where?
Where is the jar for our veteran, this forty-year-long handler
of your letters? At his branch they have never replaced him.
The swivel-seat that wobbled with his living weight is cold.

*******************************************************
In the news the other day a lake in Bolivia completely dried,
and the peasants skinned the alligators for their hides,
leaving flayed carcasses to roll in mud that baked them
in concentered rings. Then a spider-web of cracks
appeared, no center evident among cells or dry hexagons
the lake was now. Surely the peasants could have used tulips
for ground zero among the bones, a banquet for the condors.
When the eyes of the peasants drop, taking in memento mori
where water was, in whatever mother tongue they breathe
they will need to whisper valley, no choice but valley.
And if there isn’t a word left, they will need to make one.
Life must be drained from things before we find them--
o felix culpa, you hang on plaster walls.

Nothing to do but pull the stamens back with our thumbs,
roll back the primitive, thick petals like the ears of creatures
we can reconstruct from sand, settle for the form
of the tulip, bred in bogs and polders, those marshy bridges
among low countries, but everywhere,
everywhere the form of the tulip.