Green

Hummingbirds helicopter to surveil
the begonias, all that’s on offer with
lantana between blooms and begonias
stretching like they’re being pulled
out of the pot, often in shrivels by now
but seasons are not themselves these days.
Last of the cicadas manage a murmur,
green grenades waiting for footslip
to spark their death sputter, kamikaze into
people and trees, shade revealing many greens
of summer’s end but never like the green I saw
in Gone With The Wind when I was too young,
my only memory of that middle of the day
because that’s what Mother could afford,
Daddy at work and me the victim
so she could take a break from Lemon Pledge
and Mr. Clean, burned biscuit bottoms
until spring of my senior year when she
declared the kitchen closed and never turned
on the stove again, but sitting in the dark with her,
Texas Theater’s long tenth row, the green I thought
I saw in the blank face of Scarlett’s mother,
death whispered over the heads of children
or shoved by parents into rooms that opened slow
to faces stupid with solemnity, least truthful
of adult emotions. How long would she lie there,
what would she smell like, the scene slipping deeper
into dark but I wanted it to keep going,
find out what was done with what no one wanted,
the world blinding back when we stepped outside
and my mother didn’t say a word about
what’s just a fading thought decades on,
cool green of time between seasons, book of poems
sinking in my lap, now quite familiar with the truth
of endings but remembered at a distance,
how she wanted it to be.