The insignia of being singularly the same:
Kentucky Blue Grass, fescues, zoysiagrass,
their sterility and hunger are worthless strife,
like puppet strings mandate movements to wooden limbs
and scorn the dazzling skirmishes of fecundity.
But good strife takes the take out of give-and-take.
Uproot ornaments: lawn and sticky peonies,
juniper pruned into a comatose spiral,
barberry shrub, fickle pomp of bearded iris.
Good strife invests the soil with viscera. Phacelia,
purple coneflower, lemon balm, bachelor’s button,
performance poetry of pollination invites
coworker butterflies and bees to graze blossoms
of blueberry, serviceberry, apple trees.
Lavender is the most resurrected herb
I ever met. The garden’s rites are good strife,
sancta sanctorum, give and give and give.
The price of all is all. Morning is damp,
but sun is generous, and Stacey is a worker.
The garden is a source of worry and insight.
Death divides two lovers into one lover
and one gone beloved. Unlike the lightness of stylish
romance, the hollow weight of gone makes us choose well
what all. This teaching comes from someday’s gospel,
for which a human too late is early still.
Temple, artist’s studio, a colonnade
of nows, love needs no otherworld creed.
The ineffable kosmos of our serenades
overpowers popular traffic in Darwinism
and brimstone, resists the take of give-and-take.
Bull’s Blood beet with burgundy leaves, Cherokee Purple
tomatoes, Scarlet Runner beans, radicchio,
again the meals Earth gives us will be good.
When my animula moves from this room to its next,
burn the old room, add its ashes to forest
garden. Amended soil feeds sycamore roots.
I birdfeather resurrected through colonnades of now.