Simon’s Garden
Written by Jeff Bien
Posted in Poetry
Art by Cynthia Yatchman
Marigolds, marigolds, marigolds, he madly sings
with his lovely knotted hands, night perfumes of the one most perfect thing.
Potting half-blind, with a gnarled palm, the doggerel of a crippling love,
washing his impertinent past, grouting, cleaving the wolven half-sounds.
Painting now those frail laryngeal petals, of indestructible meaning,
the fragrance of fresh marigolds that clasp the sun in the tumbling nubby
twilight.
Geraniums, geraniums, geraniums he cries, and the sky goes black
as the black-eyed Susans, black tulips, and Simon with his crooked blacked
out teeth.
There where he straightens the nasturtium’s spine, and waves his wand,
above the chain of boulevards in the Capucine, whispering in a Celtic song.
Kneeling by the entrance that low lines the ground, lilting toward the heart
that rounds the gouache of thick watercolour, a triptych of night stars.
Lifting his brush into a tiny fury, the enthusiasm of one more hourglass
glance
breaking the earth with the sulk of incandescence, a garden of gratitude and clandestine wrath.
Shingly little tiny stones pollinated from a boulder eighty million years
old,
the wild quiet coast, pummeled, and the gaping orange peonies, festering with ants.
Tarting up the mole-hilled lot with impatience, petulant monkey flowers,
thyme, clover and lavender
and the Durban white daisies with faded buttons, laced by toothless yellow
bones.
In the rough box, a gigantic fuchsia, tied tall with a ribbon of string, named after Nana
the old dog he loved so much, whose wagging tail purses still suddenly in his dreams.
Another he calls Christina, hardy as the whizzing of hummingbirds’ wings
gone now, glib and deathless as the sea wolf gilded inside.
And a third spiraling on a trellis, in memory of Suzie Dow, the niece whom so he loved
loathing the dalliance that blesses her unrequited name.
Captain, oh my captain, as slowly he weeps, the corpulent noise, lacelike in the marrow,
the universe at war with war, in every flower, that goes untried, and undrawn there.
In two hundred million years the Himalayas, will be plains, the sea his
rotting teeth
and nothing more or less true than the stars, as far as they are near.
The bloom in the vase, vassal and Lord, even now signing the both of us,
“here there be dragons”, they say in an odd vehicle of tongue.
At the edge of the universe, the sparrow kings pluck the dying light, night
of the hungry ghosts
the local fisherman chant ex voto, the unanswered prayers of hope and joy.
The skylark seed bursting into climbing flowers, chasing a godless god
wild tropes in the little lanes, collapsing under the weight of the roses.
Dear, dear, loveable friend, may your masked eyes, catch moonlight
in your frayed palsied hand, that holds the homeless there, smiting the structured glacial sounds.
In the long night of human, the wild chant, in the green hangers of every
wild flower
that blossom in the last of us.
A bright moon shrinks, shines on stray cats and lover’s untroubled lips
and nothing speaks.