Heartbreak: Purple, Yellow

April again, you stand ready,

lilac, dark spear.

Tomorrow you may burst, bleed.

When I flower, this forsythia,

spent on willow stem

beside you, ragged with my early passion.

Asters

The ones in my own garden

are tiny and white,

creating a firmament in the shade

of early afternoon.

The ones on the trail

have gone purple.  Surely it’s something

in the soil, probably iron.  There’s a factual basis

for everything, like the blue

hydrangea from the rusty nail.

But I listen to the crickets, too,

what they tell me about the invisible stars.

Kathleen Kirk is a co-editor of RHINO Magazine.  Her poems, stories, and essays appear in a number of print and online journals, including Beauty/Truth, Comstock Review, Drought, Ekphrasis, Fourth River, Greensboro Review, Midnight Mind, Ninth Letter, Oklahoma Review, Poetry East, and Wicked Alice.  She has a chapbook of theatre and persona poems, Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006), some of which appeared first in the anthology In A Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press, 2005).