Susan Cohen

Wild Onion

Lose yourself, go blind from ecstasy,
forgetting everything, and then perhaps
a deeper memory, a deeper recognition will return…

—Adam Zagajewski

My mother was told she would always
retain some bit of peripheral vision
but in the end, she sat in darkness, severed
from the composed world. If it comes to me,
and I can no longer make out the woodcut
above our piano from the piano wood, I hope
I’ll still smell wild onion. The bright sobriety
of the world abandoned—let my imagination
grow zoetic and wild. A forest filled
with wolves padding trails they know
by smell. Pines adding ring after ring,
those belts of bark thickening
around the hard waists of trees,
fresh texture for my outstretched hands.
Lose yourself, go blind from ecstasy…said
no eye doctor I ever met, but a poet
describing a botanical garden after
the palm trees opened up my greedy heart.
If I can’t tell the palm tree on my corner
from the maple at the corner of our house,
let my mind color them both full of toucans
and scarlet macaws, all the impossible birds
from distant tropics. I hope ecstasy
takes riotous root when, like my mother,
I forget almost everything. And like her
on the day she finally could not see my face,
may I sit smiling in a garden
and recognize fragrance and tilt my cheek,
still greedy for the stroke of sunlight.


Late Apology

At the end of a dry summer,
I hear the rustling grasses,
your unbearable thirst. I’m sorry.

I know my words can’t quench,
that you’ll respond soon in your vocabulary
of disaster—words beginning with fire
or rain and ending in storm.

This morning, we trimmed
the wisteria, cut it back to stub
before it could dismantle the front fence.

You know how beautiful wisteria
can be—lavender unfurled across
the face of our wood-shingled house
like an ornamental fan. A howl of bees.

But those green shoots groped
the throats of maples and besieged a cedar,
ambushed planks and roof-shakes—

breached our weathered trim
and yanked out blood-red pieces
like fingernails. All while we slept
and trusted the innocence of flowering.

People are not the only living things
that can pull a house down.
The wisteria will come back.

As I imagine you’ll come back
lush and roaring, after
we have left you, Earth.
After we have left you earth.

 
 

Susan Cohen is the author of Democracy of Fire (2022), her third collection. Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Verse Daily, and won honors including the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, the Terrain Annual Poetry Prize, and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Berkeley.