Laurels
Posted: August 15th, 2009 | Author: Corin | Filed under: Poetry | 1 Comment »You can grow tired of looking at the laurels;
June woods are lousy with these pink-white constellations.
Grandmother’s tires drift down the backroads
Like a team of studied horses
The track’s in their rubbery bones.
Passing periwinkled foundations,
Resolute in the years-deep leaves,
Rusted fences fastened to trunks,
The sun on the dark fallen firs.
Out into a slanting pasture–
Again, across there, she gestures at laurels.
But wise grandmothers point ’cause they know
The thinking of the shining leaf,
the gnarled branches that lift from bitter stony soil;
They can be burnt to the ground thrice-over.
Consider these returning flowers.
I might have taken some liberties with the life cycle of mountain laurels. This poem drawns on my wife’s stories of driving around the backroads near Boalsburg, PA with her sister and her Grandma Hege.