The Biblical Garden

THE BIBLICAL GARDEN / John Drury Naturally, it's plotted like a cross. At the intersection, a worker lifts pots of date palm and oleander from a wheel barrow. Later, he saws a dead apricot—said to be the real tree of knowledge—to a stump. I latch the picket gate behind me, warned about the peacock who likes to rampage through the mustard seeds, still hearing trucks grind on Cathedral Parkway, bottles smashed in the new recycling center. On a bench, I open a second-hand Bible, once used on a ship— with a name on the death page and coordinates where they lowered his body in the North Pacific—and locate the verses listed on plaques. At the far end, a goldfish pond serves as the Nile. Papyrus clusters in the water, reeds on the bank stiffen. As it points out in Kings, if you leaned on a stalk it would pierce you, like misplaced trust. I look for "dove's dung," the Stars of Bethlehem, whose bulbs were once ground for flour, but the dirt patch is bare and raked. I hear the squeals of day campers running in the parking lot. I hear the cedars of Lebanon brushing against the cathedral wall, the clicking sound of squirrels as they dig near the roots, 214 · The Missouri Review a peacock's cry and the squawking of chickens. In the weeds below where I'm sitting there's a hint of pink. I reach and pull up a flimsy letter, postmarked in Asia a decade ago. I open it and read the goodbyes and excuses of a lover in the Peace Corps. I think of the woman who read it and tucked it away, under the stone bench, looking, perhaps, at the flax that exploded in a blue cloud, miffed by the sight of the Judas tree in blossom. Love has led someone to rip off the Madonna lilies, leaving a bed of cut stems, shunning the narcissus, the "rose" for which the desert rejoiced— flattened by cloudbursts, wilted by the heat. A crowd has gathered. A guide pipes up. She explains that cumin and dill were used to pay taxes, that judges carried sprigs of rue into courtrooms because of the stench, that olives were grown for lamp oil since candles belonged to the Middle Ages, that Russians, on Palm Sunday, wave pussy willows. A faith in living things, their flourishing, could grow here, along the paths of baked earth, where bees land on the purple flowers of the hyssop, where aloe leaves, rubbed on burns, are soothing, where cinnamon leaves reek of camphor. To whom can these blessings speak? The bitter herbs and tamarisks are so full of themselves, so complete, they spring from the tended earth of testaments, emerging like the willow to say "I cover you with shadow, I compass you about." John Drury The Missouri Review -225 To my mother, who taught me in Sunday School, who gardened so aimlessly her tomatoes, once halved, had the seeds of zinnias inside, the rye says "I was not smitten because I was not grown up." To the children on the blacktop struggling at volleyball, urged on by counselors who shout Rotate and serve and blow whistles, the bay tree says "I spread like the wicked in great power." To the woman who wept when she folded her letter and slipped it in the envelope and hid it, the mustard says "I am the least of seeds, but the birds of the air will lodge in my branches." 116 · The Missouri Review John Drury ...