Circle of White

Circle of White

When I was young
down at the feed store
earnestly buying flower seeds,
in jeans dirty at
the knees, with broken nails
the old woman behind the counter told me,
Make sure you buy
some white ones.

I smiled without
looking up,
bought red zinnias
blue larkspur, orange marigolds.

Another year, dividing
daylily roots the color of parsnips, 
separating twined fingerlets 
of old gold crusted in red clay
with the ladies from the garden club, one said
The only problem with daylilies is
there are no white ones.

I looked at her, frowned,
kept the pale cool stream of water
running gently on the fat-toed feet, 
mothers and fathers
of bright orange and yellow and pink.

After a rose lecture by a very
old man, forty years
in the glasshouses, come
to teach us type and form, 
soil and pruning, texture and scent, 
I asked him which 
was his favorite rose.

He sighed 
his old man's patient
twist of breath,
pretended to love them all, 
but when I pressed him 
named the Snow Queen.

Now I’m an old woman
forty years in the garden, 
witched with white
a circle centered in snowflake flowers,
so simple, so clean
so plain and innocent of thrusting,
that all other colors are truer beside them. 

Above the autumn chaos of orange, scarlet, 
amber lemon sulfur yellow, dead brown
or hopeful blue gold crouch 
of next spring's pansies,
the last white rose calls to the eye,
cold bright and singular
as the first summer lightning 
in the night sky,
strong

as the sudden quiet that comes
after tears and howls,
the sleep after too much
Of everything.

 November 2010

revised November 2011

Posted for    Poetics   at dVerse Poets Pub

Header photo: English Hare with Purple Fennel, by joy ann jones

The rose mentioned in the poem was  Rosa 'Frau Karl Druschki'  antique climbing  hybrid perpetual rose, 
bred in Germany by Peter Lambert, 1901