Vona Groarke

Five Poems

The Garden in Winter

 
Against the orange of rowan berries,
debutante hollyhocks turn dowdy
and nasturtiums seem old hat.
I make an hour’s work out of spilling
cornflower seedpods out into air
without a hint of blue in it all summer.
My antic husbandry. I let the gooseberries
rot for not knowing when to pick them
and tied sweet peas to driftwood stakes
with too much ocean still in them. Soon,
it will be time to bring geraniums indoors,
marshal them under the console table
to sit out weather people fret about.
Already, nights have a seam of frost
in which the stitching is coming loose.
Dark hours rummage through the rooms
so my heart, (that dogged, little thing),
learns to accept itself as autumnal
in a plangent, bulb-lit sort of way.
No telling when one thought
becomes another;
when the very idea
of the garden in winter
slips into the notion
that life, on its own,
is not nearly enough.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags:

Comments are closed.