This Spring

This Spring, the convolvulus feels much thicker.

Perhaps it was in the field when we came here,

but in building a garden, we spread it.

An invisible roaring past the gum, to the south,

where the wind cuts in at the valley’s

lowest point. Your “Bubble Trouble” hand-held Book

Day prop, with the long white handle, that your mother

carefully painted, now placed inside a vase with wilted blue hydrangeas

and faded, spike thistle globes. Ryōkan, the Zen

monk poet, writing how everything swells, then fades towards death.

How the woman he wanted to make love to, as a youth,

now a white-haired nanny in the village. Birth,

growth, swelling, flowering, death – and then, being born again.