Jacaranda
my mother recalls the jacaranda at Cocoplum about which
my brother wrote a poem both not here
but the tree is still filling our corners
his letters hold branches up
in Miami they were fewer bloomed for a week
minor prelude to slow drives in August Subaru hatchback
tanking over blue king crabs crunched to white meat
after shuttling out through mangroves & plaster
crumble through what was left
they bloom for a month or more here purple kerchiefs
I sweep the patio 3 times a day at the peak waxy
sap dark drips on concrete
on warm days they dry quickly and I sweep them in purple
piles they buoy me I do not let them go
the air filled with purple chiffon bees
nose into them roll over hummingbirds try at them
sharp at their softening jowls
but this morning my parents gone the purple’s fiction
the cool wind sly
from somewhere else like here but where
things stay themselves the crabwalk’s slow thinning
Christo’s pink-sheathed islands in Biscayne bay shredding still
and now it’s over and I’m less though the jacarandas
blow down the same
they cut it down the jacaranda
now a blank
sunspot crowded by concrete
I arrange bark amulets flowers twigs little
leaves
I learn about you on the prairie
things about to live
are close, and hard, like flame
beaten to armor
shields sheathing
pussywillow’s white
clenched dense
another limb stark
red as manzanita.
a dun-brown one that
bows out as it grows
scaled with buds then
draws hands together to pray,
drive them upward
I can imagine birds there, in that thicket.
at first I can’t see you there at all
you in my future arms soft and plump, fragile
but now, but now this is your early spring
this is your still-winter:
you are flexed cells forcing out
you are crusted with fur and wax
you engage my body
breathe water, my blood
bud closed and feeding
I can’t see you and you
are blind and taxing
Leah Claire Kaminski‘s poems appear in journals such as Bennington Review, Fence, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Vinyl. Dancing Girl Press published her chapbook Peninsular Scar. Some of her recent honors include Grand Prize in the Summer Literary Seminars Fiction & Poetry Contest and in the Matrix Magazine LitPOP awards judged by Eileen Myles. She lives in Chicago with her husband and child. Find more of her work at www.leahkaminski.com and follow her on Twitter at @leahkaminski.
