Spring Coronal

Again this year I’ve failed the peonies that came to us

when we bought our house in summer, not knowing what

pink and white glory grew in the northwest. After the first May,

still childless, seeing how a single bloom could overflow

the cup of my hands, the stems bowing to the ground

under their weight, I bought cages to circle the red shoots

after they crowned but only used them once. Arrow-like

as they emerge from the earth, the just unfurling leaves

look like fingers, reminiscent of intestinal villi and sea anemones,

moving with unexpected purpose. It is the force that through

the green fuse drives the flower, drives me to try and fail

again to conceive, which turns the leaves green, my eyes green,

everything greening and growing before my scaffolding

is in place. Again this year I’ve failed, but I haven’t been outside

in eight weeks without precautions against “the sickness”

as we’ve come to call it in our house, long days spent only

with my children, four and six, and my husband. A surly demand,

a dropped dish, misplaced keys, and I find myself wearing a crown

of overtowering rage, like the sun’s corona flaring,

the outermost layers of atmosphere flung violently into space,

invisible to most instruments except during a total solar eclipse,

as in 1869, when scientists detected a spectral green line,

possible indication of a new element they called coronium,

but in 1943, that grassy green was identified as iron

in a forbidden transition, half its electrons stripped away

by heat exceeding a million degrees. The world is burning

while I drift in a bubble of comfort but seized by anger

day after day until one evening I step out to find the peonies

that have managed to stay upright now reach my hips,

the pinks already perfuming the air, the whites still closed

tighter than a fist. The next morning I wake

with my grandmother’s voice in my ears, something

about mislaid glasses, and for long moments, I can’t recall

if she’s dead or alive. When I remember she’s gone,

I sob, unable to control my shudders, waking my daughter

who uncurls from my side and asks, “Why are you crying?”

How to explain the weight of loss pressing down

after a brief reprieve. The weight of a knee on a neck.

Children in detention while pandemic spreads. I don’t.

Instead I say, “I miss my grandmother who died.”

She gently pats my cheeks, then presses her forehead

against mine, so close all I see is the dark Cyclopean

blur of her eyes. Maybe it’s better to be unmoored

by rage and grief, to burn away that which binds us,

enriching the earth, making space for new growth.

Maybe my inability to cage a living thing isn’t

a failing at all. Better to let the green drive us

in a wild unfettered tangle, blooming or not,

to feel the comfort of my daughter’s touch, the renewal

of pain a small price for my grandmother alive again

in my mind while the peonies dive headfirst into the dirt.