trilling their tiny tin bird tongues,
and three stray foxgloves poise themselves
in the grass below a collapsing verandah
where I sit, kick-starting my heart.
One foxglove is a luminous-statue-at-bedtime Catholic-white;
another is ripe-figs-in-a-box-under-the-sink pink and
Irish-forearm freckled inside;
the last, the green of hard-packed estuary sand in the shade
under a railway bridge at midday on a low tide-
while a train rattles overhead, at full tilt.
Oh, I love them, but what guilt!
Let me explain:
for many years, nothing I planted stayed alive.
Orchard trees- wondrous things with three types of Old Nick’s apples
to a branch, mutilated beyond what’s decent.
Old rose bushes, for decades besieged, grew gargantuan tap-roots,
their tortured shrubbery, long lanky whips, but jointed,
like sad magicians’ doleful sticks.
Then, one day, the foxgloves came!
Where from? Who remembers?
Nothing touched them, and they multiplied.
This year, they crowd the webby porch,
trample the moss-stricken path;
they crop up in screes of blue driveway rubble,
busy themselves amongst the buzzies,
and under the house where the beer bottles are stacked,
they blossom…
even amongst the fireweed that stinks of turps and piss
they flourish.
And what colours!
And all standing erect,
or bent as though their topiaries were pre-ordained
by a whimsical god who, more than anything else,
liked the idea of up.
Noxious things gone wild,
those foxglove weeds have naturalised.
Yet, I see it coming, that terrible day,
when the foxgloves spread beyond the fences and into the bush,
stray along the rivulet…Under the crack willows
they’ll make small furred leaves, and up the gully,
where the native heath shushes its papery wedding bells.
Pull off the flowers when they die! my drear old conscience has advised.
But, look:
their flowers can sheath a little paw,
and there are speckles spackled inside.
And take note of the way they move so quaint
in the sough of a morning chill.
I know I should (but I never will)
tear the heads off those stray foxgloves-
those wanton, inevitable, unsanctioned,
wind-blown loves.
They grow like weeds,
when all else is broken, even killed.
From stray seed, turned tenacious, those lethal blooms-
true, they may be somewhat rampant and, yes! rapacious,
but look inside-
there’s a secret
spattered in bloody red
that kicks your poor heart back to life
when it feels dead.
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