Three Poems

The Lemon Tree Syndrome

 

Howard, now dead longtime,

took me by the elbow,

led me down the garden path

to the old tree.

 

Laden!

Bursting with fruit.

Bowing under

the weight.

 

It’s on its last legs and so

it gives it everything it’s got.

The best crop

is the last crop.

 

Do you think, maybe,

this frantic falling in love

all over the place,

intemperately,

 

is something to do

with intimations

of mortality?

You are blossoming

 

with an endstage intensity?

It’s a thought.

Everything I ever learned

was from gardening.

 

Jennifer Compton

 

The little boy knocked off his bike

 

The urge to look is so powerful

that I express it with a sidelong glance.

 

Between one step and another step

I know that the knot of urgent people

 

standing tall around what I took to be

a bundle of old clothes and a horizontal bike

 

are mounting a summoning ritual

—I can see the mobile phones aloft—

 

that is the way we stand

when one of us is down.

 

The urge to rush and kneel beside him

—touch him, smell him—

 

is so powerful I have to clench my will

to keep on walking down to Aldi.

 

Jennifer Compton

 

Pink Forget-Me-Not

 

It’s a sport—she said.

Don’t plant it near the blue

it’ll breed back.

 

She shrugged. It’ll breed back

anyway, they always do.

One season wonders.

 

I put it in a splendid isolation

game and pink and different

not as leggy as the blue.

 

Next season there were some pinks

scruffy and thwarted, then

they were gone. I couldn’t keep them.

 

But, as my son said—

Bees can fly over the house.

Down the line

 

one petal, small as a baby’s toenail

pink as

in a thrusting vernacular of blue.

 

Jennifer Compton