Mums For Mother

It is your 82nd birthday today
and you love orange mums,
burnt orange, not the red roses
as happy as Valentines with white
button poms— little snowballs
they accidentally delivered.
You couldn’t find the miniature card
atop the pointy plastic spike like an
icicle, as slippery and dangerous
as the road you traveled every morning
for 33 years no matter the weather, to open
dorm cafeterias with your bundle of keys
as jingly as a security guard, brave you.
If I drove through four states, I’d take those lover
roses back—demand the slumbering
beginnings of sunsets, deliver mandarin.