"planting daffodils"
Listen to Charlotte Boulay read this poem.
The Friar tells her, drink this
potion and for a time you will be
as dead.* ** What? she says, * Are you kidding? Only the earth knows that faith. But this love is of the earth, so when she sleeps, it's in darkness, ****** a round weight curled in a papery shroud.
This fall, digging little graves, I can smell
******winter approaching like the war
that already rages, not with drumbeats and shots
but more ominously silent, a great lack
of lucidity and grace.****Too soon,
*******deaths have begun:
fruit clipped by frost, a bird limp
by the mailbox in the morning, the flaming
*leaves—don't be distracted; we're blighting
landscapes one by one.
*******It's hard to believe
that everything resurrects itself in time
***some things with more reliability than others.
So is a rooted bulb a record
of a promise kept through winter. This is the truth we only half
believe:**that each hoary, twinned sprout becomes,
in the moment before she sees him,
*Juliet, waking to a clasp of arms,
*******yellow trumpets crying.
Charlotte Boulay's poems have appeared in the Boston Review, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Cyphers, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of Michigan.
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