Invitation

You’ll visit, won’t you? We’ll toast you’re still
alive? I’m sorry summer kept you
inside. The garden full of jasmine,
soaked confetti blooms, and mornings,
the fragrance inhabits our small yard.

Months between appointments, I don’t know
how you bear the wait, willing each test
to come back clear. Mint on the sill, how
you held the can’s slender spout above
new shoots—deep deep breath, the lip

of each incision closing. Yesterday, we drove
home slowly, the boys falling asleep,
the long trees bending over us,
and each door in my dream opened
into the wrong, brightly lit room.  

Blas Falconer is the author of The Foundling Wheel and A Question of Gravity and Light. He is the Poetry Editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the low-residency MFA at Murray State University. His third poetry collection, Forgive the Body This Failure, is forthcoming in 2018. See also http://blasfalconer.com/.