The man on the small tractor in the rose
garden recommends that I take a shortcut
through the woods. He shuts off the motor
and considers, then tells me I want to head
back up the hill to where I see the leaning pole.
Across from the pole is a footpath that will lead
me past a wire fence enclosing an off-limits
yard full of equipment; this will make it seem
that I’m going somewhere I’m not supposed to go.
But I want to stay on the path, which will bend
at the last moment away from the daunting fence
to reveal a high stone bridge over the river.
I want to cross the bridge, cut through the woods,
and bingo—there I am back where I started.
What is unusual about these instructions
is the fact that I am receiving them
inside New York City limits. Directions
in the city involve numbered names of streets
accompanied by a litany of rights
and lefts. Navigating by landmark
is a country method—objects that appear
one by one like a soothsayer’s dream: the abandoned
white house, the newfangled blue silo, the lone tree,
the roadside cross, the empty rowboat anchored
in the middle of the pond. But here, too, in the Bronx
Botanic Garden, which, the brochure tells us, occupies
250 acres, it is possible to divine
direction with stories dropped like seeds.