It’s fall in the garden and the leaves on the basil freckle with black.
I am thinking of the signs of my father dying. It’s easy enough

to see in my plants; the cilantro, albeit cold-clever, eventually
blossoms with seed one crisp January morning. Its leaves,

like a diseased heart, grow smaller and smaller, duller and duller
until it can do nothing but shove the white flowers, tiny as a pin,

up to the sky in clear, utter surrender. I’m ready to die, they all
seem to say. Here is my father in the kitchen, bent over the sink,

his guts spewing from his gills. Later he sips tea and loses the strength
to hold up a hardback. Slurs siphon his tongue, like the ones I serenade

to the moon slinking the salamanders to sleep. I know how to lull down
the clematis before she stutters into winter’s submission. I speak

death’s language like a land lark to my bloomers at bedtime.
At my tender words, chloroplast will quicken, water quitting

cytoplasm for the safety of the roots, and any remaining sap unbraids
from vacuole, sweet resin of the gods, and slowly rebrands as antifreeze.

But father? When did your ribosomes rupture? Where did you begin
unshackling the dregs of your breath? When did you start hating

your life? Mine? Ours? Where were all your mitochondria when you
decided to leave me, your only daughter? Where was your glucose,

your sisters of sugar, when I needed you? I understand my mother
was not green at the time, none of us were. I, too young, and she

a season too late. Maybe she balmed your lips with honey when
she saw your end looming. A husband and another daughter later,

he cultivated her verdigris thumbs as an insurance policy.
Never again, she promised herself every night after you died.

To this day, and every year, her tomatoes are shockingly bulbous,
her figs flourish under her careful tutelage, and her grapefruit tree

towers so tall it lilts over the neighbors’ fence, fruit promisingly
sour and succulent. It’s all so beautiful and heavy, a mother’s clear

proof that she will never let her family die again. You were there,
I somehow knew it, the year she began transcribing the delphinium’s

dialect to me, the lupine’s lingo. Now, deciphering death is as easy as instinct,
at the cost of all the things you went without; cover, warmth, light, love.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash