From the viewing stand, we see ways out as giggly
families bumble through sunflowers.
Fieldside, we were suddenly in love
with sunflowers.
In the garden, rising from vines of hard-shell squash
like flaming torches: seven sunflowers.
I drive down to visit her and her damaged heart. Rigid
beside me, bloom on the headrest, a sunflower.
I say they speak to me, but the intimacy
is between sun and sunflower.
Faces beam, sun beams. Beams, also, the yellow-
petaled bloom of a sunflower?
Seed hive? Stasis chamber for hundreds in inter-
stellar sleep? What lodges in the disk of a sunflower?
Early spring, I’ll crouch to rip out the kettle-
bell-dense roots of each sunflower.
O brash joining! The grooms’ lapels match
golden cummerbunds with sunflowers.
Curves dull and hard like industrially molded
plastic: the back of each sunflower.
Hone neglect. Early watering breeds shallow
roots, and—timber!—there goes your sunflower.
I thought maybe—briefly—when he insisted
that we pull over to gaze at the field of sunflowers.
My boxes of photographs, diaries, birthday cards—
as practical as a harvest of sunflowers.
He did it to amuse me, the bud vase, the jamming,
the thick stalk of the sunflower.
Wanting you back, or a version that loved me, I imagine
leaving, like a pike across your door, a sunflower.
We take one in hand and spin, accelerating with
twirling ballast: the bloom of a sunflower.
Petal fall, birds launch at the disk, beaks puncturing,
hollowing each striated seed inside the sunflower.
Day one, balance a seed on your fingertip.
Day one hundred, stand in the shade of your sunflower.
Late at night, a neighbor sneaked into this garden
with a coping saw, canvas gloves, and a lust for sunflower.
Ben: son. Benjamin: son of the right hand.
Their gay gardener, I answer also to Sunflower.
