poem

August Garden

She kept secrets in March

while birds spilled the beans

and frogs egged each other on

to reveal hearts hatched

swollen and glistening.

She never cared for the

shallow attention of the

cultivator churning stillness

into cake dashed and

glazed with her frozen

smile. She made offerings to

birds. They begged standing on

broken crust and schemed future

robberies under cover of the

chaos of creepers and vines that

grew at a ridiculous rate shown in

science class on brittle film threading

through a ratcheting projector.

She drank in great gulps, head

thrown back, spilling water

that soaked through layers

and overflowed down

the length of her to pool

around her feet then vaporize on the

hottest days into a soft dream

edges erased, colors receding

with the setting sun into a paste

thick enough to spread on a slab of

tomato sliced right off the vine. She was

always glad to see me, rooted, staked and

bound there, unable to lose herself

in a crowd or at a party, command

the center of the room and laugh into

her glass or walk the rows covered over

with broad leaves that hid a world that

scuttled and mated and ate and died.

She was always attractive, reflecting

the chemistry of light shed

from the greasy smear of an Impressionists

pallet.