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Donna Pucciani

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Yesterday

we blamed the wind. At the back doorstep,
the pots had tipped red geraniums
prone and headless in the dirt, adrift
in broken stems of iris, indenting Russian sage.

Busy hands righted all amid twilight gusts
that shook the maples like an angry mother
and rustled buckthorn loud as rodeo.
The sky had promised storms for three days,
never delivered. The flowers sleep now,
watered but unsettled.

Bold as dawn, the perpetrator
with a white tail shaped like a blossom
returns to sniff the resurrected blooms, and I,
watching from the window, see the creature,
small, tender, and hungry as memory,
rise up on hind legs, push harder than wind,
his eyes’ desire for petal and leaf
toppling the ceramic urn filled with vermillion,
the very object of desire.

The long ears flatten, the nose twitches,
the front paws draw back in a hail of pebbles
and peat as the scarlet-scented pot explodes
onto the earth again, the beloved
sabotaged by love. On cue, the rain arrives,
watering one forlorn rabbit and his dead flora
as thunder brings a once and future storm.

Donna Pucciani has published in such journals as International Poetry Review, The Pedestal, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Tears in the Fence. Her poetry books include The Other Side of Thunder, Jumping Off the Train, and Chasing the Saints. She is Vice President of the Poets’ Club of Chicago.

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