The First Trial, and: Cupid's Study, and: Elegy for Judy

The First Trial

I

My grandmother gave me a room,light-filled, above the front yard, and washedher hands of it—the solstice already a matterof rotations away. There were packets of seeds,

wisteria    mustard    fennel

the acre parceled. As a child, I was given a task.How can I explain the burden? My grandmother'seyes overcast with cataracts, she gave methe garden—

          the chafed flecksof a splintered field—each seed with its kind.At the scarred kitchen table, I sortedthem by piles,

feverfew    soapwort    sea lavender

and through them, ants marched like calamity,an invasion that never desisted. I wondered,broken down, what the earth numbered.Look close enough, and you can always findthe aberration—core without husk, loneforager estranged from the path, in searchof the cleft through which it entered.

carob    acorn  almond

On that Alabama farm, field dirttinted the wind. Therewere voices—shouts called acrosspasture, echoes from the well,                    soothing and soporific.

Voices so unlikethe ones I was sent from, the nursery rhymesgrown grim behind the walls.My father never liked things underfoot,so my mother packed a suitcase, her lipsticka violet on my cheek.

Hard frost, a month of rain,and then life suckled from the softenedearth. My grandmother kept                        to her plot.

The sheeted beds of bulbs like snow banks,a massacre of ghosts in the yard—bambooteepeed and tied in preparation for the vine—and the seeding, to which she always returned.

mint    oat    coriander

There is always a crack to move through.My grandmother's hands, neglectedleather, stroked the walls.She moved toward whatever lightwas figured.

            One learned to respecta well-turned row, the shoulder we take to the literal.In every pocket—shirt, jeans, socks—there was a jar,            to each was allotted a texture.

grit    millet    kernel

When I returned to the city, burrs stowed awayin the knit, I found nothing grownin my absence—only the ash of desperationpiled higher, swept into the corners.

poppy    sunflower    marigold

Grounded in the past, ground to dust and silt,the garden was what I lost.No longer admitted to that space,                          with its heavy air,

One reaps what one sows,or so my grandmother said, andI have found no evidence by whichto doubt her.

            Who has not pulledfruitlessly at the shoots of a gardengone to seed?

jimson    cocklebur    milkweed

You get by or you don't. There's not muchmore to learn. I haven't seen my grandmotherin over eight years, yet when I lookinto the mirror, her face, sepia-toned,stares back. The dime storewig with its flattened coffee curls, the seamhidden. Becoming.

sesame    alfalfa    wildflower

II

In Central Park, the boys are scattered, weedsfinding root in the gutters, the crevices of bricks.

semen    rubber    rolling papers

I always knew it would come to this.I left on the night my father caught mein my mother's wedding dress.

lace    bead    pearl satin

The buckle-end of the belt caught in my back,and the scars are just twists in an alley—long coming. Unloosed in the dark, any baby-faced boy can find a thumbto nurse.

Age ten, my pockets filled with as muchof my mother's makeup as they would carry,I left my father's house—that coffin over Waverly.

mascara    soft honey    glitter

I found work as a page to queens,the drag strip boys with their magic—into the water closet and Presto—a softer sex.My labors, all in preparation for the stroll,were many—

Here, every diamondis sham, and how can one not love suchfidelity,        such rations for the foragers—

pilfered from the chinks in the concrete,from the midnight dresses.

sequin    gold lamé    spangle

For these lesser forms of life,there are questions that never get asked—

Even ragweed has its season, its chance to shimmyopen in the wind's...