Little one who loved the irises, small wonders
that no one living planted or tended or perhaps even noticed,
obvious blooms, they seemed your private reserve
tiny treasure patch opposite the azalea bushes
in which a snake once hid and from which
the sweetest Rose of your childhood, a cat,
protected you, though it was likely just a garden snake
greydark and poisonless, poor harassed glory
of the backyard forest, and probably also a protector—
you will never know a southern home with mice
and only later, over those few years in a northern city
when you lived without a dog, did you ever need to capture or kill.
You screamed in the shower and stunned one small life
with its large perfect sensitive ears and it stayed frozen
until you returned and put it in the freezer, thinking that gentler,
in what later became the house rule. You were never a gentle thing,
however tender-hearted, you would have to learn that later.
You may still be trying to learn. The fancy girl with the pet snake
didn’t think the group-house mice were clean enough
for her pet to eat, as delicate and fine as she knew it to be.
You knew the fixed nature of your father’s violence
and the focus it took: how he would stop
on a narrow two-lane country road, going in reverse
and forward and reverse again, leaning out the driver-side window
and sometimes getting out to make sure the snake was dead.
He wanted you not to fear the bugs and beasts with teeth.
Secret that you were, kept from family in your freedom,
and the secrets you kept, other’s and your own,
the ones others dressed you in. No one gave you flowers—
little heads nodding, you were given rock tumblers
and magic kits and you were so so fortunate, it’s unbearable
how much precarious abundance buttressed injury
how much joy was a hologram, a role you played
on a stage whose boards you will never tread again—
so you picked them yourself or left them unplucked and stared
into their hearts looking for life, counted dogwood crosses,
pulled nectar from the throat of honeysuckles with the others
and waited in the coming hours to find out if it was poison.
Little deer in the meadow of the night, night was the name
of your first friend, and it had once almost been your own,
you deer among dears, hidden though some suspected your scent
sneaking through the leaves, and oh, the roses, everyone knew
the constant roses of your grandmothers, the front porch portraits now lost.
The irises arrived just once a year, backyard strangeness,
little spiral galaxy unearned, but you remember them,
and I remember you, small one, uncertain origin, lost home.