Hope like Wildflowers

I count my hope like wildflowers
on my patio in Baytown,
where I believe the wilderness

is coming back in riotous
flashes of color against the sky’s
hue of haze—the beebalm’s pink,

a smile in a hopeless place,
the sage’s blushing red, the sunrise,
not the sunset, shade of firewheel.

I plant these in clay pots—
It’s all I have. The cross vines wend
through the iron railing to create

a wall of green and tangerine
flowers, a slip of paradise
in dreary smokestack landscape

for the starving hummingbirds,
the last kaleidoscopes of monarchs,
and the lizards who come here

to my garden with a remnant
of a distant memory
of how this land once bloomed like dewlaps

at their throats in spring. Once,
my housecat caught one in his mouth.
Its tail flailed between his lips.

I grasped it from the maw of death,
released it to the pots, its body
heaving from a scarlet gash

on its belly. Did it die?
you ask. I tell you, absolutely
not. It was breathing, yes—

it was hanging on to life.
I believe, today, it lives,
laying eggs and eating bugs

Upon Seeing a Produce Stand on Farm Road 107

Stop the car. That man is selling seedlings,
not just fruit. You know how much I love
avocados, right? Well just imagine
if we had a thriving tree of them
growing in our backyard, ripe with fruit
each summer for eternity and on.

I know an avocado sapling needs
a decade to mature. And yes, it’s true
the soil and the monte of our land
could bloom instead into a parking lot—
paved over by the gods of progress, yes.
Probably, our rancho will be gone,
and we’ll be long gone, too. I know this, love,
I understand the leap of senseless faith—
how futile opening the earth must seem
to slip a seedling there and wait for years,
to try to coax it into life, to nurture
through the droughts, the chills of winter nights,
the scorching summers, to toil and worry over
something that may never give you fruit,
probably.

But if it does, if only
when I’m ancient—if against the odds
this avocado sapling can survive
the coming Armageddons of the ocean,
nuclear war, the choking hands of smog
on the horizon? It’s possible this tree
might grow ten feet tall, these flimsy stems
hardening to wood, these little leaves
unfolding, green and new, to shelter me
in shade one morning as I stumble out
into dawn to find its drooping branches
that we brought to life with dirty hands
and aching bones, then yes, if I can cup
just a single piece of home-grown fruit
within my palm then it was worth it.

I know it’s just about impossible.
I know our world will one day meet its end.
But please, let’s buy this avocado sapling
from this seller on the roadside. Please,
close your eyes, imagine us together
planting it, the world around us thriving
beautiful, our backyard flourishing
with fruit and joy and maybe even love
after the apocalypse has gone.

I know, I know, our time on earth is short.
But what better way is there to spend a lifetime
than believing the impossible—
a forest full of avocado trees
heavy with fruit and ready for the harvest.

How can I convince you to believe in this?
How can I convince you to believe in us?
How can I convince you to believe in goodness?

About the author:

Katherine Hoerth is the author of three poetry collections, including Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots, which won the Helen C. Smith Prize for the best book of poetry in Texas in 2015. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Lamar University and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Lamar University Literary Press.

In the artist’s words:

Born and raised in New Orleans, John Gregory Brown is the author of the novels Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery; The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur; Audubon’s Watch; and A Thousand Miles from Nowhere. His honors include a Lyndhurst Prize, the Lillian Smith Award, the John Steinbeck Award, a Howard Foundation fellowship, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award, and the Library of Virginia Book Award.

His visual art has been displayed in individual and group exhibitions and has appeared online and in print in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the New England Review, Flock, The Brooklyn Review, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere.

He is the Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Carrie Brown.