Barbara Hurd

One of the friendly arguments my husband and I used to have began years ago when I pointed out a small drift of foxgloves I’d planted in our backyard. “Aren’t they beautiful?” I asked.

He nodded, but later confessed in a poem that such claims about beauty made him grumble because

. . . I was thinking

of conversation, the way beautiful

often puts an end to it.

A few days later I answered his poem with a haiku of my own:

What’s wrong with silence:

beauty’s wish that something more

than mouths might open?

Back and forth we went in a non-conversation that delighted us both. But I was never sure what I meant by “something more” and now, years later, I still don’t, though I’ve been making a list of what else in the presence of beauty might possibly open:  

Clenched fists

Minds too soon made-up

The shriveled lies we sometimes use as consolation

Space inside what seem like solid thoughts

Acknowledgements of emptiness

Wider and wider contexts: A sense of deep time and the inexorability of change

Vision enough to notice what grows under shade, under stones, under our enormous need to wave a superior’s flag.

Possibilities of prepositions: alongside, among, in the company of.

Rigid lines between wet and dry, water and land,

between the garden and the gardener.

I wrote “Milkweed” some months after my husband died. In the ensuing silence, maybe exploring the plant’s discarded pod was one way I’ve been trying to keep my attention fastened to this world.