27 Garden poems

I was ill, lying on my bed of old papers, when you came with white rabbits in your arms; and the doves scattered upwards, flying to mothers, and the snails sighed under their baggage of stone . . . Now your tongue grows like celery between us: Because of our love-cries, cabbage darkens in its nest; the cauliflower thinks of her pale, plump children and turns greenish-white in a light like the ocean’s. I was sick, fainting in the smell of teabags, when you came with tomatoes, a good poetry. I am being wooed. I am being conquered by a cliff of limestone that leaves chalk on my breasts.

The whiskey stink of rot has settled in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises when I touch the dying tomato plants. Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots and toss them in the compost. It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready to let go of summer so easily. To destroy what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months. Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit. My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village as they pulled the flax. Songs so old and so tied to the season that the very sound seemed to turn the weather.

I have had enough. I gasp for breath. Every way ends, every road, every foot-path leads at last to the hill-crest— then you retrace your steps, or find the same slope on the other side, precipitate. I have had enough— border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress. O for some sharp swish of a branch— there is no scent of resin in this place, no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, aromatic, astringent— only border on border of scented pinks. Have you seen fruit under cover that wanted light— pears wadded in cloth, protected from the frost, melons, almost ripe, smothered in straw? Why not let the pears cling to the empty branch? All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit— let them cling, ripen of themselves, test their own worth, nipped, shrivelled by the frost, to fall at last but fair with a russet coat. Or the melon— let it bleach yellow in the winter light, even tart to the taste— it is better to taste of frost— the exquisite frost— than of wadding and of dead grass. For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I want wind to break, scatter these pink-stalks, snap off their spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves— spread the paths with twigs, limbs broken off, trail great pine branches, hurled from some far wood right across the melon-patch, break pear and quince— leave half-trees, torn, twisted but showing the fight was valiant. O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place.

With this rain I am satisfied we will be together in the spring. Seeds of water on my window glass, transparent sprouts and rootlets. In your backyard steady rain through the heavy dirt we dug in, our shovels excavating some history of the tiny garden. Our blades cut through the design of a previous digger: rotting boards, rocks, earthworms big as young snakes; a tarnished spoon, pink champagne foil from a party; a palmful of blue feathers from a dead jay. We dug and planted. We intend to have a history here behind this rented house. Despite the owner there is a secret between us and the ground. In the wet dirt, our fleshy bulbs and the pink cloves of garlic are making nests of roots. The fact of the garden has satisfied me all morning: that we worked side by side, your name round when I spoke it: that my fingers worked in the dirt like rain, the ground like a made bed with its mulch of leaves, orderly, full of possibilities, acts of love not yet performed. Now the water’s slap on my window has made me think of something else, suddenly, what I don’t want to, the way I wake up in the night, think I’ve heard a gun shot. The memory, news story you told me a week ago: the farmers south, far south, El Salvador, afraid to go into their fields. What does their dirt look like? I don’t know. Instead I see that some thing is being planted: U.S. soldiers watching as others bury a dead hand, arm, head, torso. To be afraid to put your hand into the dirt. To be afraid to go look at your ground: that it has been cut like skin, will bulge out like cut muscle: that on a fair day there will be subterranean thunder, then a loud, continuous hiss of blood. I wish I could see only the flowering bulbs voluptuous in the spring. But what is planted is what comes. In the fall, plant stones: in the winter, the ground gapes with stones like teeth. I hold to the plan we thought of: small: full of possibilities against despair: us handing out sheets of paper, thousands, the list of crimes: sharp thin papers delving up something in people in parking lots, shopping malls. What will come of this? Perhaps people to stand with us outside the buildings, to say again: Not in my name. Words adamant as rock, and actions, here, in the coldest months, before soldiers move again in the fields to the south.

First tomatoes of the year warm from the vine i eat one right there standing in the dirt no plate no recipe just the thing itself

I cannot know twisted Henriette of the plant kingdom Engrafted with a crutch. And yet her bulbous concerns Effuse a solid blue from inside, Like a steel Dryad, and her gaze effaced Shines with distended power. Otherwise These clusterjewels would not dazzle us so, As limbs proliferate through her pulped brain From dendrites where creation flared And this crippled tree would seem defaced, J’Accuse! beneath the lace of this clipped sister And would not glisten in synaptic blasts Would not, from all the reaching boughs of self, Burst like ripe sapphires:for here there is no place That does not see you. You shake forth a nest.

The spring has darkened with activity. The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree: Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape, Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape. These will advance in their due series, space The season like a tranquil dwelling-place. And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein: I long to crowd the little garden, gain Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small And taste it in a moment, time and all! These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years, I would expand to greatness. No one hears, And I am still retarded in duress! And this is like that other restlessness To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned, One which the tougher poets have discerned— Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne, Poets who wrote great poems, one by one, And spaced by many years, each line an act Through which few labor, which no men retract. This passion is the scholar’s heritage, The imposition of a busy age, The passion to condense from book to book Unbroken wisdom in a single look, Though we know well that when this fix the head, The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.

You give me the slip between garlic and lilies, as if this is what comes of my unprotected loves, of my hands in the sweet earth, their willful miscegenation of the border bed where you’re tucked in deep with tulips, too, like just one more of their heart-freaks: a fluke diamondine flake, a thin vein gone gold. Being mine, you’ll grow up a girdled tree, girt with a ringed-around root, nothing like the fruitful vine of good wives—one of which I’ll never be so, my not-love-knot, you may as well come up instead like a kiss: the one wind gives to rouse the Japanese maple, October’s aerialist, its bright aureole in the last late sun a red mouth, opening.

1. THE GARDEN Poco sostenuto in A major The laving tide of inarticulate air. Vivace in A major The iris people dance. 2. THE POOL Allegretto in A minor Cool-hearted dim familiar of the dove. 3. THE BIRDS Presto in F major I keep a frequent tryst. Presto meno assai The blossom-powdered orangeitree. 4. TO THE MOON Allegro con brio in A major Moon that shone on Babylon. TO MOZART What junipers are these, inlaid With flame of the pomegranate tree? The god of gardens must have made This still unrumored place for thee To rest from immortality, And dream within the splendid shade Some more elusive symphony Than orchestra has ever played.

quincunx of succulents subtle colors and forms succinct in dust appropriate the pot assigned, set each for spill into Other always my core dream winding a garden secret in every sense