Birthday Poem

by April Freely

 
                                                                                         H.F. (father)   
                                                                                         9/20/49 – 8/12/2000 
                                                                                         A. F. (poet)    
                                                                                         8/12/1982 – 

I had been thinking of coffins 
while lying in my childhood 
canopy bed, at 28, watching 
Grey Gardens on repeat, the house 
folding in and over the mother-daughter 
as I folded into the wedge between bed 
and wall and thought: baby blue satin
folds of my father’s mahogany, or oak
or was it blue, or was the light red upon it? 
The areca palm, the lily, or red carnation? 
Weak flower of this Ohio. Though I grew 
nothing during these years, I thought 
of the Pothos crowns from my old place 
in Iowa, and the tornado that blew into 
the apartment, wrecking leaves, knocking 
off plants from hooks: a hole in the room
I could walk right out of—and then what? 
Two stories above the spoiled magnolia 
I loved without sense, though I knew next 
year the blooms would be back three-fold.
My blooms? The night of the tornado, I sat 
on the kitchen floor open to stars above
as a grey-blue cloud began to cover each light
like the weathered cedar shake in the Gardens 
where you might lie down first, or be laid down
into position from which to beat out of the body 
a language like fists, or rocks—this is not
the first time I woke up in a cedar shake
thinking of delicately twisted birthday candles
thinner than a finger, or the blue flame 
underneath the light, like the half-moon 
cuticles of the little baby I can’t have.

---

April Freely's work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from Cave Canem, the Ohio Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives and works in New York City.