The Garden

 

1.

Conversation: the shape              , and the duration.
An evening, left to stretch

past tenderness,                an August grip

of summer soil, tumblers. Kimberly and Alex, in
our socially-distant backyard. As she wrote: deep

as a ruffled pool.

 

2.

Tucked in, behind suburban brick, this metreage that occupies
such amplitude. Christine gardens,

a meritocracy of garlic, calendula, goldenrod,             lavender
and lemongrass; a disposition                           of tomatoes.

Her half-forgotten horseradish, leftover from last year, nearly
enough to separate

the skin of the earth like a tumor.

 

3.

In the children’s corner garden, a pumpkin
appears, unexpectedly. What

they did not plant.

Tanya Lukin Linklater: A person enters and reads.