Lacemakers

Perennial Garden

73 Perennial฀Garden Crocus She turns the girl, herself, wrong-side-up. “Those were the lean years, before the war, before you were born.” The back is penned May, 1938, in square, blue letters, a talisman against forgetting (a petal browns at the edges, fades inward toward the stalk). Phlox In the photograph, she wears gloves, lifts a cigarette to her mouth. Sepia tones of pearl, accordion pleats, buckle shoes. Lilac behind her in a city I’ve never seen. Peony She knew the litany of perennials across a season. After mass, kneeling in the garden, she planted foxglove and delphinium, her hands like roots in the newly turned earth. 74 Guara She used to read to me in that white rocker, near the corner: brass stalk of the lamp, glass petals cupping light, the cool gray loops of my grandmother’s Manhattan vowels falling into my hair. Aster The year after Joe died, I came to Sunday lunches, watched the last half hour of her garden ritual, the way the spade seemed a part of her hand, the skin across her knuckles glossed and vaguely transparent, like tissue paper wrong-side-out. Chrysanthemum What remains when the other parts recede—a house at the edge of a wood, the name of a daughter, the work of our hands? Time diffuse as light that gauzes cobwebs at the window. Her palms waking moonflower, the skeletal coils of her fingers. ...