
from GARDEN
The garden builds up the natural exactly as fast as it disintegrates. I can’t help but begin with an original. The fence, affronted: “original?” Guitar music, violin music, I read in my exercise book that with enough practice one can access the overtone sequence, “in which each frequency is an integer multiple of a fundamental.” There must be a quicker door.
But this entire place aspires to allegory. The catalpa, too, with help from the fugitive wind, has decided to escape its plot.
Everywhere I plant theories about your death they come up several months later sticky and rotting from the inside with motive.
*
The garden is not avoidable, it’s a staging ground. In heaven there will also be symmetrical chrysanthemums, labor, heaviness. I’m told the grower took gold at last year’s Royal Horticultural Society’s Flower Show. Meticulous green!
*
An apple tree painted on the wall looks like a plan. I walk over, as if to confront illustration. I pretend to cup the fruit in my hand and pull it back, pluck it from the tree, lift it into the third dimension. I drop it by relaxing my fingers. But the red fruit remains an argument kept closely to the wall, still red.
My reply is overdrawn, and I reach out as if to pay again.
*
Within days I sit in a circle talking, against a daylily. At first I chat about your young death, echoing the sentiment of a
“new sisterhood,” as if the garden had no structure. Just a cloud of light. Then violet, fugitive scent, brings me to
myself. They ask, “what can we do to prevent deaths like hers?” I stay quiet and scrape the plat. I find shafts, beams, I discover, what, a new luminescence? No; centipedes, reforming loss, lattice of rot and raw matter, nailed into
planks. A pink wilderness of sod and infrastructure.
*
An ant breathes, pauses. The ant thinks, and I think. I think
the garden preserves the pages of books, rather than vice versa. The oil of flowers writes in empty loops, slow against the English. Before you died, I could imagine a book’s fourth dimension—the dimension of stain, skipper of pages. Now the ant enters a tunnel it built itself, and the garden rotates around it like a thread around a spool.
Another path unwinds, then splits.