Garden cycle (keeping time)
- Garden cycle (keeping time)
Early blue lavender ('Munstead') and air cannons over grain fields(the pheasant, visiting us regularly now, startles in the hedges)
Rosemary flowers like minuscule orchids (and insects see how to go)Writing at all feels pointless from the moment I think about death
—all the marigolds are coming up now, just as I expected they would
Cosmos and marigoldcosmos and marigold—and next to themhyssop, scenting the floors of the ninth century
One point of close attention is to see that things are not dead, despite appearances
Blood and chive flowers the thing flowers and then dies the cat biting the rabbit's carotid artery
A red poppy / a pink poppy
all of everything opening with a cross in the middle
I get preoccupied with my vegetables to distract myself from the pain in my lung [End Page 148]
and hate the ant and the aphid as dry weather brings the cabbages to bolt
(berry on its bed of straw; bee balm)
(a cuckoo, a few thistles)
"The book attempts to stave off the single end"
Reading in the garden, always distracted by the garden
A honeybee fumblesitself through airand is more itselfwithout questionthan I am myself
—although I doubt it knows it can die
Mint takes over horsetails take over creeping ranunculus takes over thistles take over; one day and the human disappears
Only anemone Don't worry
"Flowers cannot understand" [End Page 149]
The rose goes to aphids siphoning its youngest leaves
Does being able to name it make death more terrifying or less?
—If I beginto misplace words— the chitchit of birdspeak
for language now [End Page 150]
éireann lorsung lives not far from the Atlantic Ocean, in a small apartment in a small city, where she makes pictures, books, and clothes, and spends time thinking about literature and art in the company of others. Her collections Music for Landing Planes By, Her book, and The Century were published by Milkweed Editions. *
