HELIANTHUS ANNUUS
This summer’s harvest: the dried heads of fourlate sunflowers, resting on the gray weathered boards
of the children’s swing set, abandoned as one by one
they left home. The petals in the center disks have dried
to the color of nothing; I scrape them off with a glove,
exposing the heart with its black-and-white seeds
that attract black-and-white birds: white-breasted nuthatches,
downy woodpeckers, black-capped chickadees, the only
creatures moving in the monochrome landscape, every
gradation of brown, all of us waiting for the first snow
to fall.
And I think of Van Gogh’s Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed,
such an unusual still life, not arranged in a glazed vase,
no background, no horizon, just the husks of themselves.
These are not the sunny flowers of gratitude beaming
from all angles, stems akimbo in a stoneware bowl.
This was his motto: the sunflower is mine. People brought
bunches of them to his funeral. But these dried carapaces
are utterly without color, no bold gold strokes, splashes
of sun. No cloudless azure Midi sky, the opposite
on the color wheel, to set them off. Just these husks,
rattling in the wind, these fragile baskets of sunshine
and shadow. The whorl of seeds, a Fibonacci sequence.
When the last one is plucked, who tallies what remains?
