To a Redbud

Abstract

To a Redbud Debora Greger (bio) When I heard your name, I thought lipstick,cardinal, ketchup, pigeon-blood ruby, something sanguine–– all the while, two weeks a year, you flowered something the field guide calls “purple/pink” with an air of defeat. You haven’t bothered with leaves. Furred with petals, you race the wild plum into bloom. You cloud the sky. You’re childhood’s Horse Heaven Hills come back in dream, dirt painted purple by dawn. The Greyhound bus that no longer runs––it trundles over White Pass, the only passenger the ghost of my mother. Dead two years, she loves to travel so lightly now. She’s tumbleweed curled in her seat, prickly as ever–– if she still finds Seattle “excessively green,” she won’t say. Why am I not there to meet her? Even in dream, the living keep themselves busy, betraying the dead. Flowering Judas, they call you, redbud not red. [End Page 81] Debora Greger Debora Greger’s latest book of poems, By Herself, will be published by Penguin in the fall of 2012. Copyright © 2012 Middlebury College Publications