Six weeks after I planted potatoes, they are finally all up, the latest leaves no bigger than the ears of the mice I was sure had dug up and eaten them, especially after a series of holes appeared in each hill. But it’s been unusually cold this spring, and sprouts were simply taking their time. Our neighbors had urged patience, and they were right.
All this waiting to see what happens with the pandemic would be hard to bear if I didn’t also have something to wait for: a garden growing and changing day by day now, so that time doesn’t merely pass like some lifeless assembly line, but unfolds, ramifies, flourishes, bears fruit.
even as
I pull weeds my beard
keeps on growing
evening garden
counting the rings
in the wood frog pond
another year
200 years old
or ten thousand
former road/streambed
rhododendron trunk
bare as high as a starving deer’s
neck can stretch
elevation measured
by the number of unripe
spikenard berries
slow-creeping slope
all the tree boles curved
to keep their balance
38 years old
the one-acre blowdown
is all grown up
how big was that wind
twin basswood trunks
still stretch wide
one beech limb
has grown back into the tree
the storm was too much
they heard the wind
a half mile away
the hollow’s own howl
old corral
two years for horses
47 for trees
too red
half the maple’s leaves
are poison ivy
unchanged
for 180 million autumns
cinnamon ferns
fraying scrolls
illuminated with blue fungi
black birch log
I crouch down to get a book from a low shelf
& the room swims
I steady myself with both hands
at that very moment on the other side of the ocean
you are waking from a five-hour nap
it’s 1:00 a.m.
a cat or a fox has just screamed in your garden
your dog wakes with you
follows you downstairs
we talk
the five hours between us momentarily erased
you ask what the bible means by the phrase
in the fullness of time
your hair’s still in a bun
pierced by a pair of chopsticks
called to observe like a guard at a gallery
the art refusing to be quiet
I look over it all and let it go
my books collect time
my mind in good condition
for venturing into the world
Strangely familiar,
Yet uncertain,
I’ve been here before,
Or so it seems,
Surreal in setting,
In feeling,
In this real?
Or am I dreaming?
Time appears frozen,
Stuck in the present,
All around me is still,
The past and future non-existent,
Impressionistic from a distance,
Realistic up close,
Rubbing my eyes,
To see more clearly,
After many months, I can finally say I don't have feelings for you anymore.
The library’s doors
laid flat for their new fall paint
yellow tape guards maw
Read the Tao Te Ching
and mop up cigarette butts
in time, convergence
Ah, but how much time…
suppose I haven’t the strength
to while away Now
Posthumous toilets
wrenched sweatily curbside
on crooked revue
Dark at 1:20
(pm, that is): Straight into
summer-ending storm
Mecca Cafe fries
how am i ever supposed to change
when every step forward feels like three thousand back?
And for what felt like the millionth time
I told them to stay, to wait,
stick around, smell those sweet roses
and that things would get better, eventually;
please stop dancing with the razor's blade
and come down off that stirr'd chair.
But they ever-so loved the chair,
as they stood there all the time
lingering, twirling that ebon blade;
and I could only urge them to wait
in hopes that someone, eventually
would help them with those thorn'd roses.
Though they did remind me so of roses,
sprawled around a gardener's chair
that he'd get around to dealing with eventually,
but letting them withstand the test of time