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GARDEN DIPTYCH 1. Garlic You planted it last year, late in the season When the garden’s small dynasties were at an end— Grub-colored garlic, each clove a slivered moon Slipped back into darkness—and no clue In your blood work that you’d never see the green Wands rising above their bed or the seed-casings Forming like turbans. They even waived the biopsy. This spring, to keep the plants from running to leaf, I bent the stalks back toward the ground Where the pale, segmented globes were rounding Into the “stinking rose” of the herbals, the heal-all That failed to, like everything else. What’s left except to braid the freshly dug bulbs Into garlands, add your ashes to their bed? 57 2. Groundhog Back here where you asked that your ashes be buried Beneath the beams of cedar and rafters of fir, It’s slipped in again to plunder the entire crop Of broccoli, leaving me with only the slavered stalks And snapped-off leaves and sprung wires of the fence. Next will be the Brussels sprouts and lettuce, And the solace I’ve sought in growing things. A crop of wrapped jade clouds, until this morning. Beyond the stalks are the silktree and the bench I made So you could sit in the feathery shade. I’d banked the bed, hoed for grubs I might have missed. My second summer without you, come to this. And here I’d hoped to heal myself with the small, Careful gestures I could fence off from failure and loss. 58 ...

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