05.17.05 - 2:01 p.m.

I am trying to figure out what to do with the big blowsy climbing rose in my second foundation bed: the larger one. The rose could work part-time as an understudy for the wall of thorns in Sleeping Beauty or any other faery tale that requires a wall of thorns, such as Rapunzel, or - or - help me, here, I'm coming up blank. Anyway, with the right casting director, the rose bush could form a nearly impenetrable barrier, sufficient to separate a sexy but emotionally stunted blonde from her heroic and ultimately boring future-husband-prince-protector. The stems and branches are wrapped in thorns. There are thorns upon thorns upon thorns: and endless array of thorns, larger thorns with colonies of smaller thorns. It is the most wicked rose I have ever seen.

And: more to the point, it is a climbing rose without anything on which to climb, and so instead it grows up and sprawls every-which-way out, and is either very ugly (most of the time - mid summer, burned by the heat of August, devoured by Japanese beetles and teatree grubs) or mind-numbingly, balls-out gorgeous (now: covered in deep red single-layer-petal blooms, with perfect yellow centers).

I have been planning to remove that rose bush since... I moved in, but now I am having second thoughts about its future, and coming up with innumerable alternative schemes for its preservation none of which will ever work. The rose, he is finished - and although I promised myself I wouldn't feel guilty about taking out plants that don't work anymore, I feel it: the niggling curliques of guilt rising like vapor from the basement. Hmm. Or maybe I'm feeling the vague nausea that comes from continual compromise. It isn't clear.

In the meantime, another poem:

Behind the sky
by me

Mother, I remember at the beginning of
your third marriage the craters of light
in the clouded sky above the dome of the
temple: bright shards of sun, and sun
light on my skin. I breathed in
and felt one iota of the heat at the
center of the stars, then caught the
flat edge of your fanatic eyes above
your veil.

� � � � � � � � � I begin here, always. My
imagined future rebounds and devours
whatever remains of what I intended,
but it goes on, damnit, always moving
beneath my electrified skin, full of
finely sieved specks of hope or belief
and this-is-what-I-would-have-been
but for you.

� � � � � � � � � I've tucked another self
into the corners of my mind, another
man you never met; I'm exhausted by
the light you shed like sweat or sorrow.
I need a starless sky and the horizon,
somewhere without your veils, somewhere
without your second chances.

It's not perfect (yet) but it has good bones.