And now that I'm privy to the secret
(which turns like a beacon
on passing cargoes
that it, above all, surely stands on solid ground)
of the large tree in my own backyard,
a nuisance to some, 'big weed' they said,
at a moment through which
the world turned and called its name,
as if the world, itself,
were of solid ground.
Not so, a decade ago
and notice served that the lot
in back was to be sold,
as if stolen from a dream: the fruit of
the orchard I would someday attach;
a sense of 'trail' made through cedar grove,
planted in the middle of this large city
of little account, in a neighborhood held
in low esteem, freeway-locked and land-banked
in the gold-emobssed vaults of eastern lawyers
under the frail moon over my backyard.
Who could possibly want that? Cage's mushrooms,
and someone laughing at me, "Ha, ha!
Your idyll is gone!
"No good can come of this." I knew solid ground,
dreamed it for years in a bramble of ideas
the vacant lot in back, undersized and overgrown,
little more than a dotted line on faded platt maps,
surely too small for the gates of variance permits?
But somebody knew somebody,
and so it waved like a battle flag,
their "intent to build" on that plot,
a sensitive addition, no doubt,
aesthetically consistent; in keeping
with the neighborhood plan, no doubt.
(did that mean it would have built-in gun ports;
a triple strength steel door, abused children permanently
in-residence and weekly domestic battles that spilled into
occasional fountains of gunfire and crowds of onlookers?)
Fat chance it would ever be as dumply
charming as my own dump - still,
till the secret of 'undersized' revealed itself,
like the venom of cobras rising from baskets,
I had not considered there were two stories -
one blocking forever the view of open sky
and the distant parapets of imagination
from which I'd hunted so many ghazals
and gathered lightning from the mountains
into sacks of haiku and country lanes;
the other, clods of new black earth, the wheels
in the factories of spring begin to turn,
a thin tissue of a late frost gives it up
to the warm mists rising from my pond.
I would first kiss the ground, shake my rattles
before the southern sky, piss on the winter compost;
silly things - shout ecstasy before fertility shrines,
brought back from Walter's plenty-rice farm
in the wilder of Liberia -
I prayed and the idols worked - in a decade,
they had not failed me - the tambourines clattered,
the flutes whistled, clothes came off
as the sun rose higher, blossoms fell,
vines wrapped, fruits thickened in ovoid sacs.
Hands, smeared sticky red with passiflora gel,
drew dragonflies when seeds would fly
over what rascal a garden can really be
and we'd throw ourselves on basketsful
of fresh picked blackberries and howl
till the dogs down the block went crazy
and the neighbors… well,
they said nothing - and we'd smile at that.
'Sensitive plans', opened before me, left no doubt;
a 'second story' job that explained in miracles
of pumpkins, old shoes, Hubbard's cupboard
and the manifold wonders of packing dense numbers -
…two stories with a huge picture window in back,
no room for a backyard - just a dandy view of mine:
the sacred plants, secret burls; yes,
a hummingbird jamboree and Four O'clocks
in a frenzy to make it with the bees before sundown;
a couple of crazy aborigines smeared with berry juice
or just passing the afternoon away in a sun-drenched lawn chair;
soon to be transformed into a small cell in the panopticon
of community, tenants with children and their baskets of "NO!"
the real Weapons of mass destruction used in the
WAR ON THE IMAGINATION
STOP!
the ax missing my forhead by little more
than the distance between winter and spring
in a check-swing, "What the hell do you think
you're doing?"
(I wouldn't learn about 'garden regulators'
or 'apical moments' for a long while yet);
but my head must have sat on the top
of that back fence like a disembodied
moon. The ax-man stared and I felt
the hand of sky press the apical moment
into that sapling - not of lightning, or storm
or earthly need; but life, itself now
become the hologram in every bend and break;
for the rest of its natural, branching life.
"Your house doesn't even come near this fence,
why cut it down?"
Later, much later, Edna would posit,
"The seasons of dirt aren't like those other ones.
Filled with creatures breathing through her lungs,
they cry worlds; and to each reason there is a word."
The word magic also came later, under her tutelage.
But even then, with little more than a larynx of lead,
I had learned a few incantations of my own.
"PRIVACY," "INTRUSION," "OVERUSE"
conjured demons only a sane man would respect.
The men of city hall, the developers of distant villages,
these men weren't sane. They sat there, unmoved.
"aesthetic sensitivity" kept glaring
from the coded page in the permit office
and someone kept kicking me under the table.
"UGLY!" I cried, "IT'S UGLY."
as though speaking in tongues, torn from me
by some unmemoried swollen moon - "that tree;
native, historical and irreplaceably beautiful.
The rest of this is, the rest of this is, "ugly."
So, the windows were turned east - out of sight,
the cheap siding was turned brown and green
and the fence tall'd against the rules;
and the tree grew - 30 feet in the next five years,
until, limb by limb, a daily reminder dimmed
and the seasons of the imagination returned.
Only in the deepest of the barren months -
though sonnets no longer plucked from distant whispers
made their nightly journeys through the polar skies;
but, when the leaf abandoned branches hatched the moon,
and myth-made word swirled about the smoky fires
of a mid-winter haze, was the trick revealed -
a world projected on a Wayang screen -
would I would stop and listen to the earth breath
in the season's want, or wrap red flags on okra stems
while fish shagged gnats above the silvered pond.
Only then, would those two stories speak
of a distant forest cottage in vine and thatch;
of cedar grove and creek, when things beyond
gave way to dream and seamlessly I'd throw
chance seed at The War Against The Imagination;
and
clinging to some solid ground,
now
thick-rooted in the sky.
© 1992, 2006 red slider. All rights reserved.
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