THAT YEAR for My Mother by Susan Laughter Meyers

   That Year                                            

for my mother

When the black-eyed susans begin to bloom

in the backyard, and the moonbeam coreopsis

bursts into tiny stars, I think of the year

I banished yellow from my life. It was the year

I dug up the lantana, when I didn’t plant

narcissus and all the buttery bulbs

but chose white, and a little blue, for the garden

without knowing that I was readying

for two long years of her dying. The next spring

I painted our kitchen, once a lemony gloss, ecru.

I threw out from my closet all the blouses

hinting, from their hangers, of glad canaries.

Beginning that fall I dressed in a dull haze

of beige, toning myself down for the end. 

I ignored the incandescence of morning, the amber

of dusk, and leaned to clouds billowed in black.

The week in November she died I loaded the trunk

of my car with flats of pansies, three sacks of bulbs.

I wanted my hands working the dirt, a dark loam

that would spring into jonquils, daffodils—bright

coronas of yellow, and yellow, and yellow.

First published in The Southern Review; rpted. in Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 20