Poem For You

I started this poem with a flower and it was raining crackling in sheets across the roof. It was late and I should have already been asleep. The thunder struck close and I was startled. That flower had long since drowned and my poem had gone to rot, but the point is no matter how I begin some piece of you always crops up -- whether it is your strong jaw, your country twang, or your mutilated thumb. Because that flower I was thinking of is on the struggling rosebush that your mother planted in your childhood front yard.