Distilling Wild
Distilling Wild
Again I tore banana peels, eggshells,
added coffee grounds —
still, everything stunted.
So, I planted a guitar,
butternut’s shadow,
headfirst and beside
the lone sprouting chickweed.
Perhaps some tree
or song to blossom. Maybe
the snap peas would clamor up its neck,
bar the strings when it’s gusting.
Despite beauty,
a garden is a boundary.
We stalk the ramshackle sidewalks,
honeysuckle and clematis stretching to
triumph over planning and cement,
nodes looking for any crack or seam.
The bookstore clerk tells me
they sell the most poetry in Spring.
This season the wind has stirred
the strings only once.
Abuzz with pollinators and
a distant churchbell,
the sound here and
nowhere.
The writing of this poem began with the stanza:
It’s no wonder that poets,
with near certainty, return to
gardening. A chance to distill
the wild world.
After recently attending Butchart Gardens in Victoria and reading The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing, I’ve been thinking about gardens. Early in the book, Laing reflects on the relationship between the ideas of a garden and paradise:
At first I thought it was the gardens that were being compared to paradise, as in heaven, but to my surprise the concepts ran the other way around. Our word ‘paradise’, with all its charmed associations, has its roots in Avestan, a language spoken in Persia two thousand years BCE. It derives from the Avestan word pairidaēza, which means ‘walled garden’ […] It first appeared in the Greek language in the description of how Cyrus the Great planted pleasure gardens wherever he travelled: transliterated as paradeisos. It was this greek word that was used in the Old Testament to refer both to the garden of Eden and to heaven itself, entagngling the celestial with the terrestrial.
It proceeded to migrate to many other languages until “by the thirteenth century it had also come to mean ‘a place of surpassing beauty or delight or of supreme bliss.’”
It’s also the time of year when they grow unruly, unkempt and full of character: each yard a thicket of poppies, berries, honeysuckle, clematis, wisteria, rosemary, lavender… abundance! All turning the edges of a property line into a suggestion of life’s diversity.
Anyway, they come up a lot in my poems (here, here, and here, to start) so I was poking fun at myself with the initial stanza but wound up going in a slightly different direction. The real truth is that I was hungry, looked at my parlor guitar (it’s child-sized) and thought it looked like a butternut squash. You never know.
With gratitude,
I’ve been thinking a lot about composting and ditching the service we pay for to do the damned thing ourselves, but I keep stunting myself as to which decisions are best — build it myself, buy something to assemble, would we run out of space, where should it be stored, etc. The imagery of clipping peels and rinds immediately associated.
The line about poetry being sold in Spring felt slightly melancholic to me. There’s something about buying poetry in the springtime that connects with a sense of optimism with nice weather, and I know I’m guilty of picturing myself reading a book and never getting to it. And I don’t know why this felt vulnerable as a statement. But I liked it a lot.