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Wildflowers

Last year's poems:
Children whose parents survived
the residential schools.
It took every wind out of my sails
to write them and I wanted to burn each
and every one but a publisher found them just in time.
This year's poems:
How I fucked up my life in one small week
and ended up as a forty-five year old
born again teenager on a boat
with an old sailor
who called himself Old Wolf.
Will a publisher want these poems too,
the ones that speak of how my children survived
their poet mother who suddenly without a thought
in the world craved the sun's fire incandescent
under her skin and saw in him a thousand lit candles
by the murky pond?
Saw in him a motorcycle on a winding highway
going nowhere, the smell of his black leather jacket
in her face and her arms tightly around his waist
until she could no longer fathom life
without him.
Saw in him a beauty
that hovers along the edge of words,
an alpine meadow in late summer
and all she wanted was to be
among the wildflowers.

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