What do you think of this poetry?

Who sowed the trails we walk with hardy weeds
that propagate themselves with clinging seeds

like lancing spikelet, bristled awn and burr?
Some memories are foxtails in the fur,

and as we move the barb works deeper in,
until, eventually, it pricks the skin

to amke us pause and scratch and dig it out,
as if it sensed the fitting place to sprout

was underfoot and like its native ground.
What if, to pairing semblances we're bound

for having left the garden and its flowers
and now we wander in the rut of hours

tracking back along the trails we've trod
as if to catch the similes that God

hass seeded on the path we chose to take,
the choice of which had been our first mistake:

like boys whose shorter way turns long and hard
and only thought it wise to disregard

the fence for lying down, the posted sign,
that made no mention of the puncturevine,

and sink to learn the cost of their desires
in mocking whispers from their hissing tires.

I pull the plug. The Coriolis Effect
reverses the whirlpool, viz. Australia,
making time come flooding back
like a Tampax clog in a clepsydra.
The hour points to two years off the mark.
Again I take the footpath back to her:
before the tub drain's throaty suck, I rise
and feel the water slipping off like socks.
The mirror shows me beet-red to the chest:
finally---terrain I recognize:
the foxtail barley's purplish inflorescence,
the old familiar prick, the burr, the awns,
the thousand ways to burn a person.
Her scalding is the barb I've come to pluck:
an acid test for some demented fuck
of an aunt that proved her certifiable.
Planter of hardy weeds---it stuck.
Your bristling lance cuts clean into my ankle:
she set the child in a scalding bath:
her feet were scorched to litmus red,
her ass was nearly bronzed to bizen ware.
I enter the picture in the aftermath,
40 years later,
watching her afterbath ritual
like a lovestruck assassin
waiting for an elevator.
Her expression: Madonna of the Chair,
by Raphael.
And now she's taking up each foot in turn;
her legs collapse to 4's
as if in commemoration.
She sits on the rim of the tub and works
(as bathwater drains)
essential oils into her feet:
those abused and mottled twins,
with the rapt alacrity of a produce clerk
waxing bruised apples.
This memory grows luxurious:
I catch a whiff of jasmine,
ilang ilang, cananga, pear...
I fill the tub back up and laze
like the figurehead of a sunken ship.
Beyond a doubt I know this leads to where
the two of us broke camp and parted ways.
I find a switchback fading at the lip
of a chasm. It yawns. No surprise:
it's bored with the echo of our last goodbyes.
On the ground is an engagement ring,
the diagram of a bridge, the scaffolding
of a sonnet sequence sketched for her
on fancy stock from McWhorter's
---dismantled by laughter. So this is loss.
The trail continues on a father ridge;
I couldn't hope to throw a stone across
the void.
After I put on my robe, the game
will continue in my temporal lobe
like the tickling sky-blue ring of flame:
from whistling steam to steeping tea,
I'll grope this copper-bottomed memory.