There You Are

When the days have been pared back to a series 

of small disasters, and life is the clawed thing you keep at bay 

with locked doors, the phone on silent, you might find yourself 

cloistered in the study, having sworn off existence, 

only to see a bumblebee, fat as a Sungold tomato,

rapping at the second-storey window, as if to remind you, 

no stubborn refusal will exempt you from the beating world.

Yes, the house was sold out from under you. 

Dragged down from the mountains, you find the shores 

of your youth barbed with a mist settled sure as your sorrow. 

Yes, your nerves are sparking, sheets rivered with sweat, 

the doctor scrawling grimly on his pad.

But there are sparrows in the yard, plucking spun-sugar tufts 

of hydrangea, rabbits nesting in the periwinkle. 

Squirrels are making trapeze bars of the budding branches while 

claret tulips, like long-stemmed goblets, teeter with the drunken wind. 

It would be wrong to say life carries on without you, because 

there you are, riveted to the window in all your woe and rapture.

And in the privacy of the bathroom, which you'd thought safe 

from life's encroachment, the emerald palm, which played at death 

all winter, has sent forth an emissary, surging 

from between the frost-felled stalks;

no matter the doors locked against spring’s great unfurling, 

you lavish that dogged shoot with cupped palms of water.

No, you, in your tower of grief, are not immune.