Elegy for a Young Garden

Shattered bricks, flayed sockets

Facing the snow’s glare of absence

The air’s shock, expectation of an avalanche

Our eyes Our blank Our anguish

Spades and saws, old tools of amputation

Left on the site by the black laborers

(They’ll return tomorrow and tomorrow

With huge plastic shrouds

To gather the debris, arms, feet

And fists of plants like human

Limbs in an earthquake or a massacre)

Annihilated garden, statue with feet of clay

Although anchored in earth To anchor it within

Yourself would be a trap Paradises only last

When lost Bury it in your own depths instead

The fir tree upside down to seize

The soil’s surging, the bushes hollowed

To cradle all that aspires to air

The ivy to serve as its own rampart

Let memory be supple earth which you

Turn and re-turn, fallow ground and rootlings

Far from the flowerbeds of eternity

Thud

Of stones thrown to the ground

Bodies fall

Memories

Dissolve

Without a breath

No rip in time

No anchor either

For the living

Fall and flight

Are eternal

Let him sing of change

So that the song becomes whole

The garden has been driven from its den

On the roof terrace of the building’s parking lot

Where it yawned at seasons with the cats

(Its crime: letting in the rain)

The naked soil parodies a beach

Alignment of translucent dunes

Glass roofs, steel-encircled gravestones, with nothing

Around them to soften their geometry, neither

Lyme grass nor that thistle which roots the blue

Of sky and ocean in the sand

A calm installs itself, a space between

More moving than what comes before or after

Already birdsong has begun again

In a leafy elsewhere, the earth bends its ear

There’ll always be that anticipation

Of a world on its way to beauty

Against the tide of entropy

Where dread sees only a seed ripped out by the wind

Each stage of the renovation

Will violently contradict hope

Convalescence with strange relapses

Like that trellis of fine stakes and wire mesh

As if to shelter the terrain

Stripped of its treasure

(This will never be a ground for excavations

In spite of its resemblance to sepulchres

Opening the underworld to the light of day

Except perhaps after some galactic war)

All it lacks is the old watchtower

Unless even my looking conspires

With the human rage to imprison

Bent on forcing back the exuberance

Of any life which escapes it

Still there’s a hope:

Wires might bedeck that jewel box

With vines and climbing stems to quench

The eye’s thirst, clematis, sweet

Peas, and why not, morning glories?

Prosaic relapse No botanical

Arabesque to dress the emptiness

No festoons to whisk off the vertigo

The aim of the enclosure: to prevent a fall

From the platform New European

Standards, like the bathtub

Shower and toilet in a hotel room

Where, for a century, travelers

Had slept insalubriously

Facing a washbasin

For a long time the gardeners ambled

Thoughtlessly behind their lawnmower

Now there’s concern about their balance

But not out of philanthropy. Instead they’re given

Full responsibility for any suicide

Nothing will decorate the guardrail That would be

An incitement to throw oneself against the ropes

Before the match was over, to renounce one life

And sink into the arms of another

Mowed down, the last soldiers standing guard

At the foot of the platform

Those who hurled into the battle with me

The bloodless spring leaves

Tried to slow down the gallop of the void

But a rumbling never ceased

In the furious silence

Lying in ambush in the heart of color—

Last witnesses huddled in the skip

Hacked up like the children in the tub of brine

Before the saint’s arrival

Scattered with the poem’s letters

Why insist on mourning the green and the living

Stone, glass, steel are destiny’s bones

Left for dreamers: ponds, mud, drool

Stammerings

That garden was a young man

Almost thirty years old and so

A bit my son, my brother, my lover

Fed on my watching, I like to think,

As much as on light, on water, on juices

Its name if one recalls Mozart’s concerto

Is a guide through sound’s exuberant order

Let music, not language

Fill the senses with absence

Silence where this young garden precedes me

In all its lack of being

No verse will re-create Eden

Even if garden rhymes with eden

No Adam will re-create Eden

No Eve will re-create the sap

Even if a poet’s name

Rhymes with the vegetal blood

No Eden will rewrite the verse

Even if eden rhymes with garden

No Eden will re-write Adam

No sap will re-write Eve

Even if the vegetal blood

Rhymes with a poet’s name

But everything cries out that for a garden

There is no life without Adam and Eve

No life for Eve and Adam

Without Eden

At the end of the garden a silence

Of the end of the world

The last gardener comes by He turns

The humus over conscientiously

Wisps of straw and dead seeds

Slip between his fingers

And yet the plants did their best

Rooted to the ground they could not

Halt the phantom heady with his own speed.