The Garden
By Constance Clark
after Marie Howe
As we grow into skin that has waited so long for us to enter it,
to the garden, loosened in rain, is stretching its dirt in all directions,
and trying to recall in the underground how to make daisies.
Somehow swelling with familiar desire, it knows without
question that honey bees flit above it, tired of meadow buttercups.
The bees, striped and four-winged confident, cannot fathom
how the slow white butterfly eludes the tree sparrow each day.
Nothing is still. Two squirrels, bounding at the far end
by the woods, chase then reverse direction and spiral
out of the garden high on their agility. Ten robins—simple
wind-up toys, skittering around the oval bed the gardener
hasn’t weeded, and what seemed like the push and pull strokes
of a handsaw, is the wings of a cricket chirping to attract or defend,
I don’t know which. I ache to move muscles with their oneness.
Constance Clark is a writer and retired teacher from central NJ. Her poems have appeared in Litbreak Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Kosmos, anthologies, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of poems focused on the notice of nature and the concept of Japan’s 72 microseasons.
