interlude
my mother is fond of the claim
of gardens, gardens and time.
that her garden
is an image of the seasons to come,
the naked rose prefiguring
colors to come,
new life to come
some image of the forwardness
of movements,
some shape of the future,
like an appearance
of forms in the closer
mists, or some shore flat drift-in
from the ocean’s more distant,
deeper landscapes;
and that now,
the accumulate (aggregate) of now,
the moment of the conscious instant
was a geography,
her geography
mapped by the horizontal
proportions of seasons
with their common
but other-textured forces
(liquid solid gas),
each instance of the now
an apparition of the season
coming, requiring due preparation,
planting, splitting,
the digging of holes,
their resoiling,
a gritty-fingered husbandry,
where frozen stuffs could be seen
in this or that bed
where liquid water
dripped or settled
for the birds and wasps to use.
These, she said,
tomorrow, will another garden be.
Shakespeare wrote in Richard Three:
“Why should we in the compass of a pale
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up”
which was, she said,
the last thing she heard him say.
