Jade Wallace

The Star Pine

(for a plant, after Kayla Czaga’s “The Peace Lily”)

There is a forest between my lover
and my love. Two years ago,
when my then-lover wanted the
trappings of Christmas, I bought
him a dozen blue roses and watched
them turn to sand in my apartment.
Now, when my love asks for Noel,
I give concession; we deck our railings
in strings of secondhand light;
I drive to the hardware store and
pick up a star pine. Not a true pine,
but a delicate tropical conifer that sheds
its needles like a Charlie Brown tree.
After New Year passes, the star pine
lives on its own bookshelf upstairs,
a difficult pet that needs nightly mist,
indirect sunlight, temperance in all things.
By July it seems to be dying. I tried too hard,
moving it from shelf to porch, front yard to
back, looking for perfect conditions, when
what it needed was a sure place. I return it,
slumping, to the bookshelf. You can
euthanize a plant, I know, but I don’t.
I talk to it, say I hope it will stay for
another winter with us. If it dies,
we will bury it in our garden.
If it lives, I will give it a name.

Cryptocrystalline

(for a rock)

You find the black rock I’m keeping
and tell me it is rubber, polished
smooth and hard by the tide.
I can’t explain why I’m disappointed.
But maybe not, you say, too.

Later that day, we leave Dipper Harbour
for Cranberry Head, and walk another
deserted beach too rugged to be Dover,
beside a sea too cold to be Aegean.
You pick up stone after stone
and offer them to me,
in case I want to start a collection.
I only accept the one that looks
as though someone took the
crème-filled chocolate biscuits
you have been feeding me
(because I am too nervous to
eat almost anything else)
and rolled it roughly in
their hands like a snowball.

On the way back to the car,
I turn the rock over and over in my fingers.
It’s not quite the fine cryptocrystalline feel
of agate. Not quite agape. Maybe aegis.