At the Botanical Gardens

            for my mother, Dorothy

Its name, Aloe dorothea,

reminded me of you.

I found it in the Arid House, still,

we’re both well past irony.

What would you have thought of

its barbed and muscular beauty?

Even the word succulent seems

strangely mammalian to me.

Genus of tough-love, dry ground,

of rare and random rainfall,

yet the heat must have been there

once, and the light intense

for such a brief and grudging

inflorescence,

as if to say, for all things there

is a season.