After reaching down and delivering
spring’s terminal clusters,
a whiteness mixing citrus and jasmine
whenever we opened the back door,
our mock-orange bushes
have let fall their thumbnail
blossoms, leaving seed capsules
in their pale green starbursts.
A display of inherences ourselves,
we find common ground.
Back inside we’ll check each other
for ticks, those obsidian jots
that the exhalations of a host
alert to spring from leaf tips.
But now our pruning shears
reach the leafless, the long ago
flowered-out. Their absence
a promise. Is any other
desire at all like this?
A fragrance running us to earth.
2 Responses to Pruning the Back Boundary