I Go Sparkling

I know someone who has a beautiful garden, with a barn, a path, many squirrels, and a broom. In the garden, she moves rocks around. And the rocks respond: they summon light and shade, night, rain, snow; and they hold each beyond the winking lives of them.

I do the same with small smooth river stones. Today, near our jade plants, at the east end of the flowerbed by the front door, I moved three, and added two lichen-covered paper birch branches from the wood pile to stand upright in an abstract grove — they’re half an inch thick, about eighteen inches tall, and look fine beside the single shaft that fell from my mother’s old bamboo wind chime. With white alyssum in the foreground, and a tiny red maple nearby, this little garden within a garden is perfect for a spider, and springs to life at the falling of a single snapdragon bloom.

June 19, 2020

I Go Sparkling

I go sparkling, I go imagining, the tinkling of a bell,
of a boy, the bell on his ankle, the boy walking beside an elephant,
I go dreaming, I go deep into the shade of the banyan tree,
they are seeds on a branch where hunger teaches light,
life is a melody, a wise elephant, mother,
round, with another, I go,
where she carries
me.

Recently Banned Literature, December 10, 2014

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