Desired both by gods and demigods,
a host of divine spirits
and the zealous men
who came to her, a thousand supplicants,
her whole world was fruit and herbs,
orchards and fruit fields,
that one nymph whose care was not
for planted woods or wild woodland,
she whose name derived
from what she tended — so she disdained
those who gathered at her gate,
ensconced as she was behind fences,
and slighted that one too
who fed his eye
on her and who fetched up,
first in a harvester’s or herdsman’s guise,
with ears of corn in wickerwork,
or a goad for oxen, then as a farmhand
or a fisherman, a haymaker
with ropes of hay and wisps of grasses everywhere,
then as a soldier with a soldier’s sword,
a vinedresser with secateurs
to tend the tender shoots,
and — once, just once — carrying a ladder
as if he’d pick her garden’s fruits;
but she, whose waking thoughts
were of her craft, whole days of prune,
and spurned those suitors, one and all,
until the morning he appeared
in the habit of a hag
whose several kisses were to her
a surprise and a secret prize —
and, as the crone, he spoke of
and for himself:
you were my first love
and will be my last;
if I should die, add to my fame
the years I lost in loving you;
see, he said (still in the rags
of that old woman and her voice),
see yonder elm and how the vine dithers
on it like a dodder and yet thrives —
a thing of beauty, a swarm
of grape clusters and not only
a frame for leaves; see how, alone,
the same vine withers on the ground,
a broken string of beads, a thing of nothing.
Soften your hard heart — and open it —
offer to this hopeless love
a shred of hope so frosts, come late,
won’t blight your buds or blossoms,
nor tempests, hail or heavy showers
hijack your fruits and flowers.
And while she pondered this,
his proper self and stood before her,
a comely youth whose beauty moved
and won her just as much as his
‘I am, and will be, true.
It’s not the fruits or herbs
I yearn for most — but you.’ And then they did
as lovers do, and what occurs to lovers
occurred to them, there in that garden,
the garden of two gardeners.
(after Ovid)