On-line it’s easy
to click from a distance,
have candy, grapefruit,
pots of living flowers
delivered to your mother
at the retirement hotel,
her address the one-step option
at every predatory website.
On Sunday a few days later
you’ll hear over the phone
about what’s arrived,
how thoughtful you’ve been,
how she’ll share
the chocolate creams
with the old army nurse
across the hall—otherwise,
how will she ever finish them
all by herself? In the past
your dad would have helped,
and long before that all of you,
risking her wrath, taste-testing
for your favorite flavors.
Once, in ‘62, you delivered
the flowers, a little fistful
of dandelions picked from
all across the backyards.
How could you have known
their stems, thick as sodden straws,
would stain brown circles
where you tamped them even
against the chubby thigh
of your new white pedal pushers?
How could you have known
they’d get you into such trouble?
Originally published in Spilt Infinitive
Recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, D. R. James lives, writes, bird-watches, and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage