Freeing Iris

There are irises in our front yard, we learned,
But they live under a weed barrier,
And wood chip mulch,
And the weight of dull uniformity.

Before us, the irises lived imperfectly and wild,
Until the developers covered them,
Unknowingly, or not,
For the sake of maintenance and homogeny.

This Spring a few stalks sprung up from the brown.
When I crouched down to touch the green,
I could feel a bounce below me like a mattress spring.
A hundred irises buried below, desperate to bloom.

Van Gough painted "Irises" from inside an asylum,
Believing that painting them would keep him sane.
He drew from the flowers in the hospital garden,
And went mad within a year. 

I lay awake at night thinking about
The buried bulbs that want to become shoots,
And the shoots that want to become blossoms,
The flowers that want to finally flower.

I think of the purple persistence of some
To push through toward the light,
And the others that are trapped,
Under the pressure of darkness.

This morning on an impulse I set them free,
With kitchen scissors and muddy fingernails.
At first carefully like an archeologist uncovering precious fossils,
Then feverishly like a woman digging out her lover buried alive.

As the irises had been,
As Van Gough had been,
As I had been.