ISSUE: Spring 1985
The daffodil is not like a trumpet
but an old stand-up telephone.
I can talk into it
and the roots will transmit
by gathering the voice
into the big base bulb
and pulse it through
tiny neurotransmitters
in the hair roots.
“Hello, hello.”
I can never hear anything
but I’ll talk:
a year ago we sat at the table
under the tree and drank wine
beneath the Pleiades shower.
They weren’t stars, but they were falling.
Do you remember making inspections
of the garden? Counting the kohlrabi,
dressing up the garlic,
how you were followed by the cats?
We’re all going into the dark forever.
The animals just want us to love them.
We’re not too different.
If you hear this
will you retransmit?
When someone talks into the bell of a daffodil
he expects nothing if not a miracle.
Which is always there:
the cats picking their careful ways
among the young onions,
the red leaves on the maples,
you in the distance, waving.
