NIGHT GARDENING /the green book

Lazy, hazy—I fell in the night garden—just missing the yellow roses’ thorns.

The sweat pea curled around me, redolent—adorning me worthy.

Things didn’t go as planned. The beloved, the monkshood, didn’t return this summer.

That part of the east flowerbed, a reliquary for mourning all [love] missing, the wizening hands.

The moon, gone blank, didn’t pour its flashlight from the heavens.

Just the fireflies lit up night in flickering fractions; the batteries gone dead in paper lanterns.

There was no outdoor dinner party this year. The disease had taken its toll on necessary preparations.

Energy was an expensive commodity in a new currency, blind. The map of the brain clogged with questioning and second guessing.

Human voices couldn’t be differentiated from wind, but it was too early for the neighbors to be awake, two feet removed from the dream world.

It was then my father appeared with his signature smile, indicating things might be okay.

Tata, tell me what it’s like there. Are there flowers and moonlight?  But he was gone.

Instead, the owl resumed writing her nightly poem, an Epic on Solitude, and the wind picked up the shimmering leaves with their echoing murmuring, the sound of silver etching darkness.

To be like that—constantly moving, planting new bulbs, tubers, and seeds—but the garden had become too much for me.

I stood up, dizzy—with the small shovel at my feet—and tiptoed to the east flowerbed to dig up the small grave of notebooks.

With the last match meeting the wick of the candle in my nightgown’s pocket, I read the green book—pages about early summer before oppressive heat, days long ago laced with desire not apathy.

One by one, the pages found the candle—rushing moths to flame—that disappeared, singed in their journey to sky—while the sun climbed the trellis of birdsong.

Tomorrow night, I might pilgrimage for the orange book or the blue. There was no telling.

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2 Responses to NIGHT GARDENING /the green book

  1. Myke Todd says:

    What it is like there… We know, for sure, there will be no sorrow. The moon may require a special journey. There will be new things to learn. Today, I learned what Sweet Pea is, from your pictorial in the other realm.

    I went to pay homage today, but was informed, today is not the day for that, so I went a different direction. It was a relief, really. Goodbyes are so intense, and final, like when we push the first domino, and gaze intently as they fall in assigned order, and all is in order until the last one face plants, and lands on the concrete floor, never to be placed in competition again.

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