On Gardens

When I read about the garden designed to bloom only white flowers, I think about the Spanish friar who saw one of my grandmothers, two hundred years removed, and fucked her. If you look at the word colony far enough, you see it traveling back to the Latin of inhabit,till, and cultivate. Words that would have meant something to the friar, walking among the village girls as though in a field of flowers, knowing that fucking was one way of   having a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow falling, which means that every angry thought is as short-lived as a match. The night is its own white garden: snow on the fence, snow on the tree stump, snow on the azalea bushes, their leaves hanging down like green bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics of a garden, but somewhere between what the eye sees and what the mind thinks is the world, landscapes mangled into sentences, one color read into rage. When the neighbors complained the roots of our cypress were buckling their lot, my landlord cut the tree down. I didn’t know a living thing three stories high could be so silent, until it was gone. Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light in the windows, as though every sheet of glass was having a migraine. When I think about that grandmother whose name I don’t even know, I think of what it would mean to make a garden that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas of deepest purple, tulips like ravens. Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks poised on clean gravel. When the snow stops, I walk to see the quiet that has colonized everything. The main street is asleep, except for the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship. There are sheet cakes of  snow on top of cars. In front of   houses, each lawn is as clean as paper, except where the first cat or raccoon has walked across, each track like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.