I return not to a
graveyard, but to peonies
burying my face in their
cool petals.
Sometimes, I hold a
flower
and watch ants crawl
drunkenly into
the female folds. On a
sunny day, I might
walk a bit tipsy around
bushes, breathing
like I did with her,
past all thought.
She no longer has a name
yet is everywhere,
giver of my life and
woman who took away the sun.
I cut the bouquet, each
stem still seeping.
Her chest she showed to
us after the mastectomy
body broken and I looked
with a child’s curiosity
for a long time. When
they bless
the body and blood, I
remember hers.
I arrange the scented
peonies, so full
and pink they almost
touch the ground.
One flower to love again
like on those nights
when she read Hiawatha,
her voice
a river, a wind, an open
sky, each word a song
against the dark, little
fireflies, wah-way-taysee,
daughter of the moon
Nokomis. I fell
through the evening
twilight to the comfort of my cradle
while her voice still
lapped and whispered.
One flower to trust like
I did before
that day of continuous
praying in the blue armchair,
praying for the first
time like I meant it, that day
at the end of which she
died.
One flower to understand
the sheet
they pulled over her
like the coolest of white peonies,
a petal dividing worlds.
All the other flowers
I gather to feel whole
again, to find her
gloriously expanded;
woman with the missing breast,
story teller, mother of
iris, supreme healer
who squeezed the juice
from the grape, who covered
the bleeding temple with
her blue-veined hand.
All my flowers gathered
to find her in that river bed
on the ledge of that
mountain, on an Indiana hillside
surrounded by scrub
cedar. All the harvests
of my life I gather to
show her, to kneel
in her presence.
Finally, to give the peonies to her.
Nancy Pulley’s
previous chapbook, Tremolo of Light,
was the winner of the 2nd Indiana Poetry Chapbook Contest sponsored
by the Writer’s Center of Indiana. Nancy
is a graduate of Indiana Central College— now the University of Indianapolis.
Her poems have appeared in Flying Island, Arts Indiana Literary
Supplement, Passages North, Plainsong, The Sycamore Review, the Humpback Barn Collection and A Linen Weave of Themes, a collection of
poetry on tape, as well as other journals and publications. A new book, Dream Puzzle, was published in the spring by Art in theHeartland
Press.