2020
It is March.
I have slept through my alarm every day this week.
Confusion until the silence of dawn reveals
that commuters are no longer driving past my windowsill
where a dahlia tuber, freshly buried in dirt, prepares for spring.
Their bodies roused my body
and so we met the day together.
No more.
It is April.
Furnace on, wearing shorts in my apartment. The next day turns—
burrowed in blankets. A paper wreath “happy birthday,” hand-made crown,
delivered to the desolate planter outside my door. Celebrate on zoom.
A leaf appears in potted soil.
To welcome the dahlia, I call my grandmother.
Put it outside after the first full moon in June,
she says.
It is May.
Masked, I walk the dog past a battle for the soul
of a neighboring building, narrated for grandma on the phone.
Delicate floral arrangements cover one side,
the other arrayed in plastic leis, a mask made of a Walgreens bag, and a painting of shoes.
Already the city swelters, I move the dahlias outside, early.
In Maine, the snowdrops and crocuses have appeared, like jewels
to match grandma’s pearls and the nineteen
dahlias that cohabitate on her bedroom windowsill.
It is June.
Gunshots.
Full moon rising, marchers wear black, kettled in the streets,
heat sinking into our bones even at night, trapped concrete to concrete.
At eighty-eight, grandma works to help Somali immigrants
establish roots in Maine, her hands steady as she embeds dahlias in the soil.
My plant is joined by signs for black lives
as we sit on my window ledge, together. Ten full inches of the outdoors.
My grandmother delights over my first bloom,
as I read Jane Austen to her and wave at masked walkers.
It is July.
Grandma reports on her evening news
viewing, grief spoken between the flowers of our gardens.
Too hot to sleep, midnight, I walk to the lake, check
for cops, the algae bloom report, sneak onto the beach where
neighbors sit in the inky surf. Crawl into the waves. Float. We hold our
breath as headlights pass. In the day, only the ticket attendant claims
the sand. Rip tides worry grandma, so these ablutions remain secret.
Mandolin strings against my fingers, I play for her
the words of the song sticky in my throat.
She claps, and tells me it was her father’s favorite instrument.
Her dahlias have finally opened.
It is August.
I should be
in her garden, kitchen, surrounded by her dahlias, now
I sit with only my single plant, grandma on zoom. I walk in the cemetery,
make friends with the geese and the crows, coyotes,
squirrels, the American kestrel. My sketchbook fills with tombs.
I trace the lines of every Mary statue, angel, and Jesus of stone.
The lake is no match for the ice of the Atlantic, the numb joy of it,
but there are sharks this year—we are all in the wrong bodies of water.
Still, she tells me of music, of Poledark, the quiet press
of summer.
September.
My grandmother has a stroke.
I close my eyes as I pass the grave with her maiden name
carved across its front.
October.
She holds on.
“I’ll vote for Joe Biden and Sara Gideon if it’s the last thing I do.”
Her largest smile, crooked,
while she signs her ballot. Heat wave, I swim again, think of her
stroke so steady next to mine. Lake turns to salt water.
I write to everyone I know, and many I don’t of this
smile. Of duty and how she said “this election is unlike anything
I have lived through.” And
she lives to vote, but does not see the election.
She’d tell me to cut my dahlia and store it for the winter but instead
it fades out on my balcony, a final fall of grace.
It is November.
First the freeze. Breath held. Thaw.
Masked chorus of honks and cheers. In the street my
neighbor sets off fireworks in the warm sun. Another
marches accompanied only by her tambourine. With nothing
but my voice, a smile, I join. We spin like the dry oak leaves,
rattle in the wind. Never-ending summer, a turning.
Months-late while aerating lawns, or on porches in t-shirts, others
sing. Like summertime, like beaches, park cookouts, the fourth of July,
as if we were shoulder-to-shoulder, what used to count as city solitude.
Alone, I walk home along an alley and among
the dead, dry weeds between the asphalt and the cemetery fence
a dahlia still blooms.
