Label pinned to quilt: “This bright
cheerful spring quilt was made in
the Thirties by a black woman.”

Francis Ponge: “The present is like the first time we remember.”

Even great movements of the clouds
acknowledge that spot by the back door,
a little garden plot
with drawing power.
There, spring falls
upwards from the mint-green
depths of the Depression—tulips, thirty-one,
red, fawn-nectarine,

rimmed by a guardrail
as pink as medicine
in spoons. The tulips slide,
slip, big gown heads
strain to balance,
however deft at showing off.
Their leaves rush,
rock the silence,
cat stalking a dove
(fur rubbing, wing-escape
creaking).
Then a top strip throws
the planted rows
all off, misaligning, unregimenting.
She had a need to excite
tulips’ need to paw.
As conservator, I crawl,
hand-lens, tweezers, yellow
border urging all the while:
“Gather her filaments

too from the dark
side of our quilt, the day-
lily, squash-blossom side
(that dark a gleam).”
And I do: her silver-blue
and black hairs, eras,
equally in it,
having curled up into
this flowering cure
for winter

and held,
loosely, supplely,
like a hand-stitched seam.
They will be held in reserve,
unrusted
cultivator tools,
while strange heirs, whoever cares,
crawl on, sleep under,
bulbs doubling in this underground.
Though waking is inevitable,

is it into her absence
or her present? Century’s end—
still in this earth of Holland,
Turkey, Dahomey, Kansas,
the longing is born
to be appledoorn, red emperor,
to grow as she conceived
her park, her curtilage,
to flourish:
weedless.