Care mansion

We put the wallflowers up in our favorite sitting room,
up there on the most treasured walls
where those eyes we collected in the pond
followed our paths on the cedar floor.

Their vibrato of language;
narrowings, widenings
and the soft flit of eyelids
sounding off as curtains in the butterfly house.
We put them with the recorder
just to hear and hold onto the deep tongue
of the color and the story.
That dialect,
on permanent loop in the air raid sirens
of Care Mansion.

Grey was cold steel.
green was rare fire,
but we couldn't talk about the blues or the browns
because they sucked on our hearts.
They spoke without words
enough for themselves.
They were melancholy enough to sober up a man
just so he could drink the sadness up all over again.

North and east can only mouth this dirty west -
these eyes don't need some appendage, some direction.
They belong here where it is safe,
where the tall grass grows indoors
and the gardener blows
glass humming like a generator,
cornstalk sacrifices we made to
the scarecrow god
because we have cared for our hay men
and they were
worn and weary of hay fever.

Their throats were burning
up up up and away
so we put the wallflowers up on the spire
next to the windpipe
looking over the wastelands,
looking over the storm that had passed
and the pink swollen earthworms
washed ashore.

They were wiggling routes to leftover puddles
on the drying asphalt.
There was no way they were gonna make it
so I picked them up one by one
and they were
bottled and tangled
in the jam jar.
The joy fingers made a prayer
and said a reverent word or two;
a nod to the prosperity
of the oligochaeta posterity.
A better tribute to compassion,
they dropped into the stream where the fish ate them all up
because of how much they cared.