The Dead Send Their Gardener

He arrives in the courtyard with two cartons of juice, each of which he’ll tip and drain at one go in the heat, and a sack of food for the roses. He looms over his tools, blond and dusty as a stalk of ripe wheat, surely someone’s prized lover. Centuries bask among his hybrid teas, and he shakes his capable handfuls of food into their beds until nothing but roses nose the blues between lake and garden, lake and sky, the lapse of lawn where a party could be if those who lived here once returned to pour the wine. She’d be the sort to tuck a bud behind her ear, and he to catch one in his teeth. But alas, we’re guests of the present, expectant and sultry; all graciousness is fled, and rain fills the spent blooms, tumbles their tops, weighted with ruffles and shocks of pink. The gardener too disappears with his breeches the color of mustard and cinched with a string, gone back into the pages of Hardy or Lawrence. Perhaps, he’ll appear again Tuesday next, but he won’t look any of us living in the eye.