Garden
When I still had to reach up for the doorknob
I was wondering why the Lord God whoever that was
who had made everything in heaven and the earth
and knew it was good and that nobody could hurt it
had decided to plant a garden apart
from everything and put some things inside it
leaving all the rest outside where we were
so the garden would be somewhere we would never see
and we would know of it only that it could not be known
a bulb waiting in pebbles in a glass of water
in sunlight at a window You will not be wanting
the garden too the husband said as an afterthought
but I said yes I would which was all I knew of it
even the word sounding strange to me for the seedy
tatter trailing out of its gray ravelled walls
on the ridge where the plateau dropped away to the valley
old trees shaded the side toward the village
lichens silvered the tangled plum branches hiding
the far end of the scrape of the heavy door as it dragged
across the stone sill had deepened its indelible
groove before I knew it and a patch of wilting
stalks out in the heat shimmer stood above potatoes
someone had cultivated there among the stately nettles
it was not time yet for me to glimpse the clay
itself dark in rain rusting in summer shallow
over fissured limestone here and there almost
at the surface I had yet to be shown how the cold
softened it what the moles made of it where the snake
smiled on it from the foot of the wall what the redstart
watched in it what would prosper in it what it would become
I had yet to know how it would appear to me
– W.S. Merwin, from The Vixen, 1996 and Migration, 2005
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I read this through three times. Each time I found myself unconsciously reading it with pauses and intonations as if there were punctuation. My childhood training must have really taken root and/or I am very anal. Nevertheless, each time I read it, even with my punctuation fetish, it sucked me in at a very earthy and primal level. Inspired by Merwin’s potent “heat shimmer” memories of my childhood cropped up … the sticky pearldrop on the milkweed, the feel of the moss at the base of a tree where I found a white arrowhead, the fuzzy canes of the tomato plants, the weed salads my sister and I fed to our neighborhood friends.