I am lazy, it is true, in regard to my yard,
but let us consider both the architecture
and design of this place: the skyscraper roses
that I prune in a ruthless attitude, with my
rose scholarship in hand—cut down to a five leaf
or a leaf bud—and still they rocket up,
their June blooms head and shoulders above
my head and shoulders, their own atmosphere of scent
and the roses the previous residents planted, over in
the too-much-shade, are leggy and fantastic, let go
their own exhalations: the leaves red and green,
turning hands in the light, the breeze: yes, I am
ecstatic, it’s the home I return to: language tends to it
and I let it take its head: it’s like when the police
came to our door, polite but firm, to say
someone had complained about the lawn which,
honestly, we also let grow headstrong and wild,
and I said, it’s a project not a failure, and he said,
okay, but with some disbelief, and I said, no,
it’s a meadow, and it took all my bravado to say it
with conviction, and I pointed out to him:
the thyme I had plugged into the lawn and the bees
that thrived there, and the native broadleaf grasses
(read: weeds) we let go, their seedheads trembling,
loose, promiscuous: the flax weaving a blue haze,
the cosmos I was trying to coax into self-sowing,
the lemon balm pressing its case: daylilies, pincushion
flower, the evening primrose, the daisies all
carpeting street level of the roses’ sky busting room
—how could this not be design, I asked him,
patient policeman come to deliver a caution only,
just please talk to your neighbors, he said, and I
begrudgingly granted that this might be, after all,
a good idea, an abundance of caution and, I suppose,
neighborliness, which I resist whilst allowing the yard
to proceed, powered by its own steam, and I
neglect the most basic tenets of sociality: well,
but the bees! do I get no credit for the bees, threading
their cooperative work among the thyme flower?
I walk lightly, cautiously, and the sharp odor of their
pressed leaf drifts upward, lagging a bit, as I collect
the mail or deadhead some or another thing—and I say
hello—I do—to the woman with all the children
who lives across the street, or my next door person
whose name I have never known as we pull our
respective bills from the box. My bees must move
among their tidier flowers, I would think, and their
lush lawns, made green and weed free through
their industry, their application of chemicals, and (maybe)
their righteous judgement of me? later, we try to finger
which of them would be incensed enough to make
that call. which would look at our tall grasses and see
a threat to the order of the neighborhood? which cannot see
the bower we have designed for what it is: an eden,
an incantation to the wild, a perpetual glory
that requires the merest touch of human hands.
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