The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,

She looked so limp and bedraggled, 

So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle, 

Or a wizened aster in late September, 

I brought her back in again 

For a new routine-- 

Vitamins, water, and whatever 

Sustenance seemed sensible 

At the time: she'd lived 

So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer, 

Her shriveled petals falling 

On the faded carpet, the stale 

Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves. 

(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.) 

 The things she endured!-- 

The dumb dames shrieking half the night 

Or the two of us, alone, both seedy, 

Me breathing booze at her, 

She leaning out of her pot toward the window. 

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me-- 

And that was scary-- 

So when that snuffling cretin of a maid 

Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can, 

I said nothing. 

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week, 

I was that lonely.

-- Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) American poet and teacher,  winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1954, for The Waking, two-time National Book Award winner

Annunciation as Fender's Blue Butterfly with Kincaid's Lupine

The endangered Fender’s blue butterfly

associates, not with common lupines,

but with the very rare Kincaid’s lupine.

—NATIVE PLANT SOCIETY OF OREGON

But if I were this thing,
my mind a thousand times smaller than my wings,

if my fluorescent blue flutter
finally stumbled

into the soft
aqua throats of the blossoms,

if I lost my hunger
for anything else

I’d do the same. I’d fasten myself
to the touch of the flower.

So what if the milky rims of my wings
no longer stupefied

the sky? If I could
bind myself to this moment, to the slow

snare of its scent,
what would it matter if I became

just the flutter of page
in a text someone turns

to examine me
in the wrong color?

-- Mary Szybist (1970- ), from Incarnadine, 2013 (National Book Award winner)

Images: top, from Oregon State University, pair of Fender's blue butterflies on Kincaid's Lupine; bottom, photo by Dana Ross, published by the Xerces Society. Fender's Blue butterfly is endangered; its habutat now consists of two small pockets of prairie in the Willamette Valley in Oregon that has the lupine on which it lays its eggs excusively.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

--Robert Frost (1874-1963), from The Poetry of Robert Frost