Later, larkspur
i.
In the sweet midwinter of these slopes,
when seeds still clasp blue buds like lockets,
my father leans on ski poles without skiis
or snow underfoot. His legs resemble
numchucks unlaced, two stout scraps of wood,
their threat dispersed. Stabbing the earth,
he pulls first one leg, then the other, in line
with some interior fold, the body’s diameter,
a paper doll’s measure of even distance
from point to point. Gone is his best guess
of who he was, top to bottom. Later,
larkspur, nettle, paintbrush, wool stars
will poke the warming air. Fleabane bloom
like mops. Each day will coax a new color
from the empty earthwells he drags over now.
Whatever fear he sees in stone and runnel
surrenders to a lie: the lie he traffics in
to please his daughter, the lie of him I harbor,
a girl storing flowers in the pleats of her dress.
When she runs to his outstretched arms,
he gathers her up like stems.
ii.
In a good year of flowers, history stubbles
the sides of rock: miner’s lettuce, bedstraw, soapberry
garnish the native poultice, the hands of pioneers,
who come from Wheeling and Omaha
to stuff their mattresses with weeds. Settlers name
the wild plants for what they do, like engineers
name gears or witches, brews. Like all words,
the names ferment: traveler’s joy, candlewick,
wait-a-minute bush. We lose their sense. What’s left
ripples across the stream of reason. Washed by time,
my father travels the route I ask, gamely
picking his way toward where wildflowers will be.
Prophecy divides him out of the world, like conceived
cells. Even in a good year, horehound no longer comes
to candy, nor flax to cloth.
