Sunflower
"Bring me the sunflower crazed with light."
                Montale
Weaving out under a sky of prickly stars,
he digs for his keys ‹ clutches the metal
roots tangled in his pocket. Overhead
the buzzing BUD sign flinches. Talking
in its sleep, he thinks. Bet it's saying,
"Let me bloom." But all around him
drunken shadows hiss, "Night¹s already
a kind of blossom." He pauses ‹ sways,
staring and listening . . . wondering
where he should turn. Something even
a god-damned sunflower knows by heart.
 

- Joseph Hutchison
 
 
 
  

Joseph's work includes The Rain At Midnight (Sherman Asher Publishing, April 2000), and  Bed of Coals (University of Colorado Press, 1995). His poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Mississippi Review, The Nation, Ohio Review, and Poetry.
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