July 22.19

ELEGY IN A KITCHEN GARDEN

My poor beautiful tomato plant,

victim of its own vitality

lies helpless, hapless,

like my old Christmas tree.

Don’t tell me what I should do

or shouldn’t.

Doing isn’t feeling.

I tried but couldn’t,

and that is everything.

 

 

If you are a gardener, dear reader, you know that lessons grow in the garden, some of them dismal. Yesterday a rambunctious wind announced the coming of today’s blessed, cooling rain. I tried desperately to right my gorgeous Beefsteak, but my two hands and two feet were not enough. And the thunder growled.  It was with real sadness I had to abandon the rescue. If you are a gardener, you understand the feeling. It isn’t about what to DO.

July 21.19: Postcards from Emmy

Ice cream as accessory

might not occur to you or me,

but Emmy says in cone or float

it’s absolutely couture haute.

 

Happy National Ice Cream Day, dear reader!

With thanks to the anonymous photographer

and, of course, to Emmy.

 

July 19.19

The dragonfly scratched

his diminutive cranium,

accustomed to suburb’s

petunia, geranium.

I was so close

I overheard:

“What is this?”

his exact word.

 

July 17.19

Nemesis: Goddess of Divine Retribution

Vengefulness her main attribution.

My wicked ways put me on the hook

for a plague of ears with a “who, me?” look?

 

July 13.19

Two dazzling things happened yesterday, dear reader!

As you know (or not), I’ve been in the throes of downsizing. I moved into this smaller house about a year and a half ago, and that makes this my second gardening season here. If you are a gardener, you know that you have to earn ownership of a garden; it doesn’t just happen. Nor does it “just happen” that a house becomes home. For me, it’s all a work in progress: this isn’t home yet either inside or out.

However, there were these two heart-stoppers yesterday:

I caught a glimpse of new color deep in a tomato plant. I was down on the ground as fast as my creaking knees would allow and, yes, there it was: the first red tomato! MY tomato! If you have read my blog in the past, you know that until recently my main claim to gardening fame was in consistent tomato-killing. I grew them in memory of my Grandpa Mauck but without much hope of eating actual tomatoes.

(Last year was The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, if you recall. The tomatoes had their revenge.)

And tuxedos in the dill! In my last house I had a magnificent dill patch and these very formal, elegant caterpillars feasted royally thereon. Swallowtails bobbed their thanks over what was left. This year the blasted rabbits ate to the ground every single dill plant I tried to grow, so I planted dill in a pot on the deck. Now come the beautiful caterpillars. Can swallowtails be far behind?

I dance a rheumatic jig and think that maybe home will happen.

July 12.19

Wandering a nursery

as every gardener knows

risks a Chapter 11

a lien or a foreclose,

but I chloroformed my conscience

and did it anyway

wearing mental blinders

lest I seriously stray.

Then came the gardener’s gasp,

that lub-dub of the heart

and a whole new Scabiosa

leaped unbidden in my cart.

I’d never seen the like

of this particular

others that I’d grown

were less oracular.

With buds that look like berries,

florescing into pins,

whimsical and winsome

a gardener’s Mickey Finn,

it mesmerized my mettle

jellied my backbone;

it’s not my fault, of course,

that it followed me back home.

 

 

July 9.19

Goosebumps on a frog

amphibious grinning bliss

perhaps you too have memory

of one immortal kiss.

 

More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg,

and to sculptor Pokie Park for her work titled

“I’ve Been Kissed.”