Taproot

The flames aren’t there as he intended.
You can’t make angels appear at will
in your garden. The milkweed
is late in coming, and its name, for the life
of him he can’t remember, nor, having been told it,
can he keep it fixed in his mind,
those pathways gone like where he walked, now grown
almost as if he had never set foot
in the forest all those years, as if no one had ever marked
a path before him. But the day does come: fire blooms
to the knees all of a sudden, and monarchs,
hungry, enter while heading to another country.
He stands to watch them on their way.