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It’s Marge’s.

Her hands planted the
peonies and the lilacs.
She chose the burning bushes that flank the walkway on either side, and the
boxwoods guarding the front porch.
The two massive pines?
Christmas trees from long ago,
legend tells.
Growing ever greater, choking the
light from the eastern beds.

Every day this week we’ve had rain.
Storms sweeping from the south, filling the
Ohio River past her banks toward
civilization.
She never agreed to the townhouses, the
bars and cars, the
soccer fields and parks and highways and boulevards.

I can always orient myself to the river,
despite my sense of no direction.
My gutters spill over, too, and water the multiplying weeds in Marge’s garden.
And the boxwoods, and the
burning bushes, and the
honeysuckle taking root in the old stone wall.
The rain waters it all, unconcerned which is garden and which is wild
Earth.

My mother is concerned. She is
exasperated to hell with me for allowing
Marge’s garden
to become ripe and full and wild.
She’s right, you know,
as a person of civilization,
the bars and cars and townhouses and boulevards,
the gardens of the generations who occupied these homes so long before us,
they demand order.

This garden isn’t mine.
It’s Marge’s.
And so the house.
And so the world.

But I can always orient myself to the river, the
storms, the weeds.
I am the wild things.

A river can
drown.

A garden
can be drowned.
Ah, nothingness.

No joy, no stress.

Well? Unwell? Depressed?

Survival, more or less.

Ah, nothingness.

Wake up, get dressed.

Work, go home, re-nest.

Sleep but never rest.

Ah, nothingness.

Alive and dreamless.

Me? Oh, fine, I guess.

Can’t stand in the way of progress.
Word association for the chronically divested
It’s a magic trick
Just a flick of the wrist
A wink and a smile
And you’re mine for awhile
And I’m yours, too,
Less me, more you
A mirror, so you see
A you-painted me.
And where did I go?
Oh, inside, down below
Never pleased, always pleasing
Always flight fawn or freezing
It’s a super power
Being such a good liar
Being everything to everyone
Dealing the cards
While holding none.
Don’t disappear.
Not today.
The humidity is too low,
The vibration of baby insects hums along the ground
Surely you hear them.
Tomorrow it will still be springtime
And the day after that.

You can’t disappear, you’ll miss the fireflies and the August lilies
You’ll miss the homemade garden salsas and the baskets of eggplants and basil and sweet peppers
You’ll miss the crunchiest leaves under your shoes
The feeling of warmth after cold
The November moon.

Don’t disappear,
The wide world needs witnessing
And you’re the only one with your eyes to witness it.
There’s a family of bullfrogs nearby
Their cries rise and volley
Shimmering in mezzo-soprano melancholy
A torch song to the new moon,
Pleading her silver bloom
return to the black spring sky.
Today was a sad song day
And I am alive.

I read a poem about love and tomatoes
that moved me to tears

And it’s raining now,
storming.

And I am alive.

Were I a different kind of mother,
the kind from movies,
I would wake you up so we could run outside and dance flailingly in the front yard as the neighbors peer through their slatted blinds, shaking their heads.

The storm has already slowed, though.
It always ends eventually.

The rain will bring tomatoes
and soften the grass between your tiny toes.

And I am alive.

How perfectly my aliveness fits my every me,
how much room there is in here.
If fill my aliveness to the very top, somehow it is never full,
there is always space for another swirling galaxy,
another thunderstorm
another sad song.

Tomorrow there will be tomatoes
and soft grass and tiny toes.

Today was a sad song day.
And I am alive.
Elliot Smith Figure Eight, Beck Sea Change
Ex.
It was you
Who embodied brokenness
So long ago
When my skin was soft and pale,
Lineless as the summer sky.
Clear eyed, then,
In everything but you.

Tonight it is the same
I know your name
Your number by heart -
Now so scarred it
hardly bears the beatings
Of that forgotten mottled sweetness.

And you’re still broken
And I am healed,
healing.

We catch up, old friends.
Flowers blossoming in the wreckage
Of a felled tree.

Oh, to again be nineteen.
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