The speaker begins by looking closely at a small handful of brown grass, then widens the view to a whole field shimmering with seeds and lavender light. Small prairie details feel alive: roses lean into a ditch, reflections appear in a clear pool, and cattails seem to keep quiet thoughts. But the poem shifts toward absence. The gardens and yards are empty, the faces that once belonged there are gone, and only “flower ghosts” remain. Leaves move like slow dancers in the wind, but no one is there to see them. The speaker says goodbye, knowing it is useless because no one hears. The mood is quiet, lonely, and elegiac—tender toward the landscape but heavy with loss. It feels like a private farewell to a place, or to people, that memory can’t fully hold onto.
Memoranda — Summary
This handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.
Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown.
These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts; these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I turn my head and say good-by to no one who hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.