Aaron Belz

Naming Flowers

Naming flowers might be a poet’s trick,

but the rose bushes across the street,

green now in the shade of a green ash

and surrounded by overgrown crossvine,

the rose bushes hanging partly out

over the gravelly roadside, flowerless,

don’t remind me of us, or you, or how

you once empowered me with your anger,

nor do they remind me of myself, now,

depleted in your absence, because

aside from the occasional full breeze

that ruffles them, and though their leaves

are spiderwebbed, beetle-eaten, they

seem at peace with who they are.

No, we were more like flame azaleas

growing wild in a highway ditch,

like gentian, blood root, foam flower,

we were solomon’s seal, blazing star

mown down by jumpsuited inmates,

stalks and bright petals scattered among

rain-mucky fescue, fallen among clumps

of sweetgrass that grow in marshier

places, and that is not to say our love

was ephemeral but that it was maybe too

bright and mistaken for weeds, viable only

among hippies and children who pick

and assemble them into bouquets,

place them on domestic coffee tables

as if they had value other than the value

that is immediately apparent, maybe

some brightness for a day, a poet’s trick.

Aaron Belz is a poet and essayist who has published across a wide range of venues, from Wired to Christian History to Boston Review. He currently serves as a contributing editor for Capital Commentary, the weekly current-affairs publication of the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C., and writes regularly for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Books & Culture, and other periodicals. He has published two books of poetry, TheBird Hoverer (2007) and Lovely,Raspberry (2010); a third, Glitter Bomb, is forthcoming from Persea Books.