About the Dead: Poems

Creating the Garden

[29] C r e AT i n G T h e G A r D e n here, we have a fountain with a waterfall, and all around us a chorus of bees feasts on purple blossoms that hang from the fingers of ivy sprawled like a jester’s hat across the wrought-iron gate. it is as though this scene, so festooned in morning sun, was expelled from the body of Garden: an exorcism, or perhaps an adenoma lumped and bloodied in a sterilized dish. Along the path, the loosed petals have turned gray as ash and ought to be swept from the cobblestones. But for now, we’ll sit together and listen to the lithesome friction of the fountain spilling water into a basin of water. ...