27 Garden poems

It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees. It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists in the wind, daring anyone to come in.  I was trying so hard to love this world—real rooms too big and full of worry to comfortably inhabit—but believing I was born to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch in the back acre of my grandparents’ orchard.  I was cross- stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker’s needles.  The effort of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong. Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood made it mine—the adventure of that red sting singing down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to: just space enough for a girl to lie down.

It was a good idea, cutting away the vines and ivy, trimming back the chest-high thicket lazy years had let grow here. Though it wasn’t for lack of love for the trees, I’d like to point out. Years love trees in a way we can’t imagine. They just don’t use the fruit like us; they want instead the slant of sun through narrow branches, the buckshot of rain on these old cherries. And we, now that I think on it, want those things too, we just always and desperately want the sugar of the fruit, the best we’ll get from this irascible land: sweetness we can gather for years, new stains staining the stains on our hands.

Surprised by a frill of white flower where I'd never planted an eye, I decided to fence it with sticks and let the renegade live in undoctored soil where the garden gave way to volunteer poplars and acidic white pine. Why not? After all, away from the tribe, in clay where beetles drill and weeds emerge inspired, it might grow eccentric, proliferate and thrive. When autumn air said disinter , to fill the bin for winter, I troweled under and pulled the stem until a rabble of rough spuds red as Etruscan urns emerged as if to prove that whatever urge drove the rogue to sow itself and strive beyond all cultivation might offer a vital lesson to any apostate instinct aspiring to survive.

It’s not spring yet, but I can’t wait anymore. I get the hoe, pull back the snow from the old furrows, expose the rich dark earth. I bare my hand and dole out shriveled peas, one by one. I see my grandmother’s hand, doing just this, dropping peas into gray gumbo that clings like clay. This moist earth is rich and dark as chocolate cake. Her hands cradle baby chicks; she finds kittens in the loft and hands them down to me, safe beside the ladder leading up to darkness. I miss her smile, her blue eyes, her biscuits and gravy, but mostly her hands. I push a pea into the earth, feel her hands pushing me back. She’ll come in May, she says, in long straight rows, dancing in light green dresses.

Today I planted the sand cherry with red leaves— and hope that I can go on digging in this yard, pruning the grape vine, twisting the silver lace on its trellis, the one that bloomed just before the frost flowered over all the garden. Next spring I will plant more zinnias, marigolds, straw flowers, pearly everlasting, and bleeding heart. I plant that for you, old love, old friend, and lilacs for remembering.   The lily-of-the-valley with cream-colored bells, bent over slightly, bowing to the inevitable, flowers for a few days, a week. Now its broad blade leaves are streaked with brown and the stem dried to a pale hair. In place of the silent bells, red berries like rose hips blaze close to the ground. It is important for me to be down on my knees, my fingers sifting the black earth, making those things grow which will grow. Sometimes I save a weed if its leaves are spread fern-like, hand-like, or if it grows with a certain impertinence. I let the goldenrod stay and the wild asters. I save the violets in spring.   People who kill violets will do anything.

I.The Secret Garden fooled the squash bugs by setting young plants in the center of piles of old weathered cedar shingles that i had dumped one truckload at a time around the perimeter of the woods out of sight of the house yet near enough to garner a hand of bucketful for kindling when the woodstove became december’s focus the shingle pile had flattened from firewood attrition and gravity so only a few layers remained no wild plants grew up through the shingles although a couple of hours of sunshine lit each pile each day i called it the secret garden because no one ever walks that way II.The Change the middle vegetable garden and the south garden (Vegetable River) have provided entertainment and food first the june-july drought scorched and stunted growth even with frequent watering then came the late july and august monsoons with a 65-70/85-90 mix almost every day the plants invigorated the bugs rebirthed the grasses skyrocketed from rock-hard drought to rainforest jungle i took a gas-powered weedeater into the Vegetable River delta yesterday whacked some high weeds on the periphery of the melon patch and uncovered two twenty-pound crimson sweets in another corner of the patch a crimson sweet was so ripe that it had cracked itself open sixty-five days after sticking the seed in the ground i was thrilled after three years of growing vines and stunted fruit i had finally grown big ripe melons III.August august gardening is by caesar certainly august the purple hulls the yellow-shelled cowpeas yellow and white okra blossoms all wash out in the intensity of <<green>> whelming <<green>> even on a cool morning or evening i come in from the search and harvest having had not the slightest perception of heat even with sweat drenching my forehead double-shirted long-sleeved against the reborn mosquitoes and realize only then how hot my body is the air is cool what created the heat? a perception narrows that more than heat and humidity are at play an intensity a swollen vibration more than the half-black over-ripe jalapenos more than the crisp prongs of okra pod more than the nutty crunch of raw cowpeas more than the fruitful tangle of kentucky wonder and morning glory smartweed vines more than white glistening corn smut blisters more than the biggest brightest-marked three-inch grasshoppers and cicadas that you’ve ever seen an intensity underlain in a crush of <<green>> an interplay a swollen vibration a chlorophylandering that even the dogs won’t come near no snakes no skinks no lizards too strong for spiders

This early the garden’s bare but people pay to walk it, at plots of budless brush stop, as if remembering, and stoop to mouth the names— araucaria araucana, monkey puzzle tree, something Japanese—each particular ridiculous to be.

I’m talking to you old man. Listen to me as you step inside this garden to fill a breakfast bowl with blueberries ripened on the bushes I’m planting now, twenty years back from where you’re standing. It’s strictly a long-term project—first year pull off the blossoms before they open, second year let them flower, watch the bees bobbing in every bonnet, but don’t touch the fruit till year three, and then only sample a handful or two . . . Old man I’m doing this for you! You know what they say about blueberries: blood-cleansing, mood-lifting memory-boosters; every bush a little fountain of youth sparkling with flavonoids, anthocyanin . . . I’ve spent all summer clearing brush sawing locust poles for the frames, digging in mounds of pine needles, bales of peat moss— I thought I’d do it while I still could. You can do something for me in turn: think about the things an old man should; things I’ve shied away from, last things. Care about them only don’t care too (you’ll know better than I do what I mean or what I couldn’t say, but meant). Reconcile, forgive, repent, but don’t go soft on me; keep the faith, our infidels’ implicit vow: “not the hereafter but the here and now  . . . ” Weigh your heart against the feather of truth as the Egyptians did, and purge its sin, but for your own sake, not your soul’s. And since the only certain eternity’s the one that stretches backward, look for it here inside this garden: Blueray, Bluecrop, Bluetta, Hardy Blue; little fat droplets of transubstantiate sky, each in its yeast-misted wineskin, chilled in dew. This was your labor, these are the fruits thereof. Fill up your bowl old man and bring them in.

for Patricia Anderson “To do as Adam did” through the twilight’s fluoride glare Mercury in perihelion (rotating exactly three times while circling the sun twice) to Pluto foot tilt up the slide at either plane and build a Garden of the brain. Internetted eternities, interspersed with cypresses ply ringed air about the many spectacled apples there. Flamestitch niches orb in swivel orb, The Muses thrush at center turning.Phospheros arborescens they sing sense’s struck crystal clarities to knock the knees (or scarlet hollyhock, against a near blue sky). No end of fountains lost among the shrubberies full eye may bare. Fixed stars with fireflies jam the lilac. The Lord is a delicate hammerer. Gold hive upon gray matter He taps synapse (“carrying to”) (“carrying away”) an immense bronze pinecone moon-knit at the end of a vista of sunny jets d’eau, silver poplars. All shivered in a pool. Literally, a flowing: form-take-hand -with-form (That Which Fasteneth Us) pillar to pillar the great dance arch itself through all that is or was or will be, 3/4 time. This will be a glade at the head of one stream and a resonant gnomon before it will stretch regions of signaling gnat-like resiliencies in the atmosphere of where we are — or were. Or will be, when the mingled frame of mind of man is celebration. Gates, which separate the wings of tiered ilex, open in caverns of atoms passing from one into another’s zenith of periodic movement, vast helicoidal shift: a vaulting of arteries beating their heads against the dark. This is the body of light. Vertically in a chromatic spread chord — Elysian elision — J’avais bâti, dans un rêve, un palais, un château ou des grottes

There is little I can do besides stoop to pluck them one by one from the ground, their roots all weak links, this hoard of Lazaruses popping up at night, not the Heavenly Blue so like silk handkerchiefs, nor the Giant White so timid in the face of the moon, but poor relations who visit then stay. They sleep in my garden. Each morning I evict them. Each night more arrive, their leaves small, green shrouds, reminding me the mother root waits deep underground and I dig but will never find her and her children will inherit all that I’ve cleared when she holds me tighter and tighter in her arms.