Suite: Planting Winter Gardens

I.

Something here is finished. Some beginning’s on the way.
Baldcypress leaves slump in stale pageants, camellias

pickling in the duck pond. Beneath a laurel brake
two cardinals shuck through all of last season’s showings,

picking at nuts, husks, shriveled seed. One lifts its wings
circling the clearing, quizzing the crimson hat I wear,

concerned by my sudden bobbing red. Coming down
the hill, dimpling its muted switchgrass like a tired deer,

I hear blue jays filling sky with piercing cries, moaning
silence. They descend to a redbay’s final dark fruits,

taking them forward beyond this day. They know of life
& the taking of life. They strike & keep from striking.

II.

This hillside is hardly cultured, smothered in bloom-scraps
born of tenacious worlds. Dandelion to eat raw,

steep in tea; common vetch to wash over skin
or to spark desire; dock to drink and thin-out the blood.

Buttercup splays across the hillside fair, leading
to a woods-edge dense with maples. I sever them

each at their multiplied bases, treating clogs, guiding
structural diversity and inviting fine

succession: light-gaps giving way to sky-kissed soil,
pines & locusts: though so much remains. The boughs I steal

tug at the weeds, nearly plowing impacted earth.
This is almost work, this life & the taking of life.

III.

The teeming earth lounges in silt. The pipeline creekbed
sifts through trash. I grub chicory from a field-edge

while insect chorales tune again into full body.
Crickets fill out the grass beds. Cicadas resonate

through hornbeams. Bellowing grasshoppers chick, fleeing
into tangled ivy, their incessant song sounding

more like humming powerlines or cable boxes
each day, reminding me of the future, its growing

hold on the present, the way in which it steals
this afternoon. Then the path home, lined in brilliant life

& the taking of life. There was only one buzzard
by the road today, though there may be more tomorrow.

IV.

It is a maze and it is not a maze, this pressed
collection of specimens: coneflower, goldenrod,

black-eyed susans waiting to be harvested:
and I do Death’s odd duty with glee. Clearing out

stems as first rain falls, a gray bug for which I have
no name lands on my arm. I slide my blade beneath

its ciliate legs, trying to peel it free,
swiping its body flat. The blood is orange & scarce,

the legs so easily stop moving. Meadow-rue climbs
above the beige earth, and oaks offer leaves to stormwind.

I make no solace of life or the taking of life.
Only of this pause, waiting for thunder during rain.

V.

There is nothing left to do. This landscape exists
solely in the mind, with all the rest, though here the view

is clear, memories of bud-break breaking buds still
despite winter’s inevitable restoration.

Mid-morning and the robins congregate, twittering
forward through heaving grasses. Late purple asters

pulse through frost. Joe-Pye weed un-droops. Sunflowers melt
sick memory. One robin pecks through a brush pile

not knowing how long it must wait to pull flesh
from morning ground, that godly task. I ruffle

through broken earth, leaving behind a coneflower seed
& a worm: one for life, one for the taking of life.