What You Gotta Remember

“What you gotta remember is sometimes change is good. It might not be better, could be awful for awhile. But then you discover what you can really do. Change forces you to be your best. Everyone wants a chance to be their best, right?”
— Charles Merle Pittman, 1928-2006

Orchids

On the telephone, my father speaking
of the way he slices steak
into strips, lays them together
with sweet yellow onions, slivers of
cheese, the precise way
he folds the flour tortilla to hold everything
together, then how he grows
tomatoes in the basement
under a bright lamp not far from the orchids
laden with buds, breaking
into blossom.

Later, awake in bed, I think of my father
three hours into the future,
folded into a quilt my mother made,
into the fragile veil of sleep that holds him
each night, the big house silent
except for the gurgling of baseboards
sputtering their heat and the hum
of those lamps in the basement, the air
still parted and moving where he stepped
from vine to vine, then the long look
into the open faces
of his flowers.

One March night, I am there,
he wakes briefly, propping himself up
on a shaky arm, and says, “I have to go
somewhere,” then he drops back,
a grey furrow in the white pillow,
and through the window, bare maples,
fractured moon, one winged seed
out of season, spinning and drifting.
At home, orchids turn toward light
in the greenhouse, their lavender petals
splotched and soft, their purple lips parted
as if about to speak.