PLUMBAGO
      

All summer long, week after stifling,
interminable week, it flourishes,
blooming in clusters at the ends
of its dull green stems, each
of its tiny, five-petaled flowers
a pastel star wobbling
in the cosmos of the afternoon.

Daily, at two o’clock sharp,
held to her wheelchair
by the ballast of grief and loss,
she rolls to where it’s overgrown
her porch, loosing to its lamps
of bluish lavender
the pale, weightless moth of her body.

Larry D. Thomas, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters also served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate.  He has published twenty collections of poems, the most recent of which is Uncle Ernest (Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, 2013).  His Larry D. Thomas: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2008) was short-listed for the National Book Award.