Sonnet: Rose Garden

All I want is to sit among the flowers...

Rose Garden
     
     I. 
I remember the Fernandez Ranch in Spring.
An ocean of lupin framed my family as young; intact.
We picnicked beside fallen oaks.
Chainsaw brays to collect our winter warmth. 

Small ponds adorned in moss collars, chartreuse,
ebbing with the splash and play of 
children and cattle dogs. I run the splitter as a boy
drunk with job. My father is teaching me.  

I lay a drying body. Mine naked and clean.
I am a boy untouched by the hand of worry.
No plans of vocation, only stacking rounds
	to split through.
My elementary body is sore and resting 
	in wild green grass. 

I see the colors, smell the bloom, 
this memory is buried 
	in light. 

     2. 
Expo Park Rose Garden shines under changing sky 
collegiate domes and the bells of the street meat venders.
I walk among the roses with a body sore.
I am a man, walking in a park sitting down to read. 

I have found the blooms and angels. 
Among red brick and traffic lights. A map. A calling. 
This is spring but something different, 
I now live in a different world. The city. 

Beside the fountain niños gather
roller bladed, velcro shoed, and free. 
I watch them spill and shatter 
as I sit to rest my knees. Writing it down. 

I believe myself a stranger here.
To the city, no, to the year. 

     3. 
Ten lanes of traffic between my memories and I.
I stand on the overpass above them. 
Grip on the chainlink the sky fades to ember.
East Hollywood, where I am, where I sleep. 

The pollinators are spinning on blooms
and tail lights all moving.
I am nowhere, I am somewhere, that’s all.
I have one foot in Shandon and one in L.A. 

I warm my house through a gas line. 
My fireplace is in disrepair and as it warms 
I caught the feeling. That never again 
will I feel the warmth, 

of lupin blooms and sawdust spraying 
while we gather wood. I was there, 
	there as a boy.