Dawn's first flush finds the peonies
marooned on a scraggly tussock
appealing in frothy bashfulness
to the festive mums and berried juniper
to sow the biting air with lush
camaraderie, to bring the lone,
the banished,
the uncultivated
into unstrayed resolution,
into gathering accord.

The garden is a version
of stone, root, bark, and
seeing, the whole of it tended
by an eye
for bounteous inadvertence,
fragrant unashamed hap,
an eye
unmindful of petty harmonies,
unfazed by the wills of a thousand
self-interested stems.
There is no officious posing
of picturesque oppositions --
the gangly, say,
with the sylph-like,
a heliotropic gladness coyed
with a wan, consumptive
lunar wingedness.
Everything springs as it lists.
Nothing needs tidying
or forcing.
Nothing is superfluous
or ominous.
Nothing surrenders
or upbraids.
The pennyroyal idles in
the ditches. The cyclamen floods
combs of unsparing fuschia.
Sparrows row among the untrained boxes
and the voles flutter the calendula.

The garden
isn't
a garden
unless the eye
reckons
and regales. When
there were
no words
what held the densities
and marked the motions of
the light? How would a grub
be told
from a spadix,
an umbel
from a nest of
gaping clouds? A scavenger
would have to be
self-luminous and
durable to find
a way
through the bluffs and thickets
of an unhusbanded search. Feet
would meld with the duff, hands
strew themselves in fingers of
voluptuous turf, the sky would run
in open mouths and drip
down spathe and burrow. There
would be antlers and rutting,
anthers and rioting spores.
There would be receptivity
and rebuffs, efflorescence
and evincing. But
there might not be
such unconvincing compounds,
the self,
unimposing, unjustified, un-
possessed, and un-
aware
just another
bit of articulate bone
in the spine of a
voluminous where.

The garden is damp and
woefully allegorical. The stone
seat is rough with
misgiving, its old pores
packed with broken hearts and
rough treatment. There was a house once
but it has now gone to seed. Flecks of
plank and window glass
give luster to the
ghostly primula. Shutters molt
and railings oxidize.
There are rusted spades and trowels
somewhere
in this earth.

There is a need for
shamanic inversions,
a dole of
spirit insects and
rowdy clowns coalescing
from the calm. Sticks
and skin,
skitterings, stalks.
But all the drumming in the world
won't specify
the loss.

The eye that makes this garden
doesn't ever miss
a beat.


Kate Falvey


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