For 25 years I remembered mostly 
what you were not 
immersed in attempting to raise my own 
numerous families. 
Only now surfacing 
at your death 
I am suddenly on an Easter Egg hunt 
In your backyard! 
glancing behind the hawthorn 
you planted the blue hydrangea's 
yellow forsythia


eggs, by damn 
everywhere ,by damn I 
did have a childhood: bikes, swings, a sandbox 
a mom & dad

Just as you've ceased living in my present 
my past fills up with presents! Did 
I hide it all from myself? Did you 
give them with the right hand & 
take them back with your left?

Like the hooded Peregrine 
your falcon eyes could talon my spontaneity, 
trim it like an unruly twig in some 
pagan hedge, noticed only by your 
Prussian blue glance.

No matter now. Now I turn my own 
twist-lirnhed plants 
this way & that just so guests 
will glance each bright green growth; 
season the chili ,as you did, at 
the last minute so those pungent herbs 
don't cook away.



You were wired at your own roots 
by the old Germanic Order 
whose wiring went back under the 
Black Forest, long before the swastika, 
to when stories tell of men who