BY LEISL MUELLER
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
buy the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the rosed curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed by grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.