On Gardens

When I read about the garden

designed to bloom only white flowers,

I think about the Spanish friar who saw one

of my grandmothers, two hundred years

removed, and fucked her. If you look

at the word colony far enough, you see it

traveling back to the Latin

of  inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words

that would have meant something

to the friar, walking among the village girls

as though in a field of flowers, knowing

that fucking was one way of   having

a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow

falling, which means that every

angry thought is as short-lived as a match.

The night is its own white garden:

snow on the fence, snow on the tree

stump, snow on the azalea bushes,

their leaves hanging down like green

bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair

to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics

of a garden, but somewhere between

what the eye sees and what the mind thinks

is the world, landscapes mangled

into sentences, one color read into rage.

When the neighbors complained

the roots of our cypress were buckling

their lot, my landlord cut the tree down.

I didn’t know a living thing three stories high

could be so silent, until it was gone.

Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light

in the windows, as though every sheet

of glass was having a migraine.

When I think about that grandmother

whose name I don’t even know, I think of

what it would mean to make a garden

that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas

of deepest purple, tulips like ravens.

Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks

poised on clean gravel. When the snow stops,

I walk to see the quiet that has colonized

everything. The main street is asleep, except

for the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship.

There are sheet cakes of  snow on top

of cars. In front of   houses, each lawn

is as clean as paper, except where the first cat

or raccoon has walked across, each track

like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.