The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Elegy with Clouds & by Robin Turner

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When My Mother Forgets the Word for Dahlia

Picking a favorite dahlia is like going through a button box.
                                               - The Old Farmers Almanac

When my mother forgets the word for dahlia
it is February. It is the last day of her 84^th year, the latest day
in a ruthless unspooling of days, of pandemic lockdown,
its cruel isolation, & winter, all the gardens covered over,
all our lives fallow, fallow. When my mother forgets                                        
                                              
the word for dahlia, tall flower as familiar to her as a daughter,
its name soft as psalm on the tongue, it is yet another day
of all the distances between us—every long year apart,
every rocky geography, every hurt forgiven & not
forgiven. And in that instant every distance opens wide

its spacious arms as every distance collapses & gathers
as dahlia waits snug in its button box to be found, tucked
just out of memory’s reach until it passes like miracle into me,
blossoming into speech— dahlia I say through the phone & into
my mother’s frustrated silence, her solitary sorting, sorting, sorting.

I give her back the beloved, the favorite flower, the one
she knows but can no longer name. When my mother forgets
the word for dahlia, I drive in a blinding rain to the wizened women
at the nursery called Blue Moon. They will know. They will
know the flower I have come for.

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