With a week to live
how would you live it?

Sulk?
Celebrate?
Would it be different?

Would you reminisce
on your livelier days?

Or love
in the last of them
every which way?

Mom said we’d have lunch
with her cousin Bobby,
driving in
from Jackson Hole, or maybe Reno,
places so far from Illinois,
I couldn’t imagine the route.

She picked me up from horse camp,
two months gone,
and said we’d stay at a motel,
cable, a pool, continental breakfast,
before shopping for school clothes.
I said OK.

Our yellow house waited
on its alley of ratty bushes.
Home had become
a question I didn’t answer.

I wanted Opal,
the sweet white mare,
and the girls from other towns
who smelled like hay
and never asked about the divorce.

Somewhere, Bobby was driving
across the country,
but all I wanted
was to go back
to the ranch.

Thriving in the sun she sways inside her garden
each time a fragrant wind arrives from the sea
Her lavendar blooms fill the earth with pardon
she bends at will like a tiny bud young and free

She is a rare and beautiful blue moon in my hand  
pulled from the ground she sets my heart aglow
when I inhale her, ... then I begin to understand
why she is my favorite rose, why I love her so

Giving always giving, she is the perfect flower
loosely scented in my home she is frangrance
convening with my senses with elongated hour  
this little rose of mine, means love & romance