Certain Outlines Can Only Be Imagined

Rain overflowing from the cup

I left outside. Honestly, it's the wrong year

to write a love poem. Though I walk

through the valley of semblance.

I am every figure in the deck. Magnolias

make me feel guilty. Half I go where

my mother sends me, half I deliver

unintended messages. Chimera

of passion flowers running into Lady Banks

barely keeping pace with the sampaguitas.

How Lady Banks is a placeholder name

for the unknown gardener who tended

this cultivar in China before 1807.

By placeholder, I mean erasure

but I would like to mean placeholder.

I would like-one day-

for the gardener to be revealed.