I always forget the name,
delphinium,
even though it was the flower
the hummingbirds
loved best. They came in pairs—sleek,
emerald-bright
heads, the clockwork machinery
of their blurred wings
thrumming swift, menacing engines.
They slipped their beaks.
as if they were swizzle sticks, deep
into the blue
throat of delphinium and sucked
dry the nectar-
chilled hearts like goblets full of sweet,
frozen daiquiri.
I liked to sit on the back porch
in the evenings,
watching them and eating Spanish
peanuts, rolling
each nut between thumb and forefinger
to rub away
the red salty skin like brittle
tissue paper,
until the meat emerged gleaming,
yellow like old
ivory, smooth as polished bone.
And late August,
after exclamations of gold
flowers, tiny
and bitter, the caragana
trees let down their
beans to ripen, dry, and rupture—
at first there was
the soft drum of popcorn, slick with oil,
puttering some-
where in between seed, heat, and cloud.
Then sharp cracks like cap
gun or diminutive fireworks,
caragana
peas catapulting skyward like
pellet missiles.
Sometimes a meadowlark would lace
the night air with
its elaborate melody,
rippling and sleek
as a black satin ribbon. Some-
times there would be
a falling star. And because
this happened in
Wyoming, and because this was
my parents’ house,
and because I’m never happy
with anything,
at any time, I always wished
that I was some-
where, anywhere else, but here.
Source: Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004)
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A Wyoming native and second-generation Japanese American, Lee Ann Roripaugh studied music, earning a BM in piano performance and an MM in music history before earning an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Beyond Heart Mountain (1999), which was selected by Ishmael Reed for the National Poetry Series; Year of the Snake (2004); On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (2009); and Dandarians (Milkweed, 2014). In 2015 she was appointed poet laureate of South Dakota.
Roripaugh’s awards include a Bush Artist Foundation Individual Fellowship and the 1995 Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize.