Sunday before the storm, I moved a dead woman’s tulips from the lawn’s northwest corner. The leathery leaves, mowed at their middle. Now my spade divines a dirty bulb’s tunic and scales. The woman who lived here before me has been dead for 30 years. When did she plant them? Why here? W, the sound of bewilderment. When? Where? I asked before he stopped living here. Do you love her? Don’t mistake why for what. There you have been. There you are. Inside your own life. Besides fire and mushrooms, what else does a lightning strike multiply? Nothing is permanent. Our lives have more room in them than we knew. What did botanists know, asks Charles Linneas 325 years ago. I’ve lived in this house—at a corner lot—a decade. Before cut, one tulip bloomed. Like a crimson star. What to name this feeling, this finding.

 

       Order of fungi

       a scandal or art, species

       or variety.