Christmas Poinsettias
By Louis Daniel Brodsky

This a.m., as I sit at a table in Milwaukee,

So distant from you, drinking coffee,

In a greenhouse dining room decorated for Christmas,

Vision arrests my listless initiative,

Compels me to focus on the slick, glistening icicles

Fixed to branches just beyond the glass,

Systematically slipping into disappearance.

Between sips, I listen intently,

As if I might hear drops they drip from tips,

Accept their bitter-cold dissolvement, with resolve,

And take a lesson from their stoicism.

But my ears have never developed such acuity

As felines and canines possess.

By degrees, my fascination lapses.

Distraction sets in, destroys the sunlit prism,

Instead directs me to the red poinsettia plants

Decorating window ledges facing the street,

Their leaves so red I begin to see past them,

To other winters, when your dad

Delivered, to the family flower shop on the Square,

Two thousand of them he'd grown, by hand,

In greenhouses he and his father had built

Long before we were new to each other

And Christmases glistened with icicle rituals

That excited us, invited us to bequeath them

To the children we hadn't yet dreamed into life.

I can see him transferring, from his van,

Five pots at a time, setting each on the marble floor,

Until they filled that converted Victorian bank,

From back to front door, he stooping, straightening,

Occasionally taking a between-trips breather,

To wipe his brow, with his ubiquitous kerchief,

And survey the celebration he'd nurtured from seedlings

To six- and eight-bloomed magnificence

That dazzled us, with its profusion — us two,

Whose tenderness was, itself, a blessing

No Christmas could bestow, its own flower

Both of us cherished and shared with the world.

But this is another dimension, here in Milwaukee,

Where, staring with growing suspiciousness,

I realize that the beribboned window pots and table vases,

Containing perfectly shaped poinsettia blooms,

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