Garden Path

traipsing along on over-large shoes
a child makes her dainty way
over the old garden path of oleander

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[Fiction] Angie’s Boot

Angie, who grew up with nothing, hoarded all that she could around her desert home. Her stretch of pale grass became an oasis: a refuge for small skittering legs and dormice in the dark. When her husband left her, she took his old work boot and filled it with rich dirt. The cacti flourished and bloomed in their new pot. Six months later, she looked again at the shoe and it was only the flowers that she saw.

Snail

Snail in my garden
On the peak of loveliness
Fresh cauliflower

Garden of Ideas

These thorny roses cannot be plucked
But tended to and left to bloom
By chance or by care
Some more wild than others.

Neighbor

The ivy has grown about your gate.
Although I pass it each morning,
I lack that courage to disturb it
and prefer to think you a lax gardener,
instead of confirming your absence.

Gnome Trouble

Once I saw a gnome in the garden
When summer was high and I was a-yardin’
With lovely ears and an impish smile
Eyes full of tricks and rosy-faced guile
He hustled me out of a foot of grass by the fountain
By claiming he’d raze the mole hill mountain
But when the leaves fell, still it still stood
And I realized, he’d hoodwinked me good
But by then the Missus had moved in with the babes
Now I avoid that patch with the lawnmower’s blades
And wonder if a treehouse would suit better
My conniving, parental little go-getter

Dandelions

A bed of dandelions
Has grown
By the back gate

Apple

I do not think we were made in God’s image
For God is all-knowing
And perhaps that omniscience brings with it
A placid eternity that engenders an unending boredom
Perhaps he thought
I wonder what it would be like to not know
To feel happiness and sadness
By maddening turns and to love and fight with equal measure
And he shaped us out of clay and made one mouth
For us to smile and frown with
And cast us in a garden that was already imperfect
For in the center of that lush promise
Hung a crimson lie:
The Fruit