"Hydrangea"

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Rosanna Warren read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

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From the bottom of the garden, enthroned in his earthenware pot,
the hydrangea god surveys his minions—
lavender agapanthuses bowing starburst heads,
red bignonia calyxes trumpeting his fame,
oleander leaves whispering of his misdeeds.
The central path leads straight to him. Behind,
a stained mirror and mossy wall back up his power.
Thousands of crinkled, tiny, white ideas occur to him
with frilled and overlapping edges. No one else
deploys such Byzantine metaphysics. No one
can read his mind. Only he remembers
the children's secret fort by the cypress tree
among fraught weeds, rusted buckets, and dumped ash,
and how lost the grown-ups sounded, calling, as night came.

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