Garden Plot Near Woods The Wildnerness o f Common Days
Partridge, Dixie
Garden Plot Near Woods "Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet." Gerard Manley Hopkins It's been years since he bent with a hoe, or hosed creekwater onto his plantings. New vines burn...
...His hedge of cornflowers gone dry re-seeds second purples and pinks...
...Dandelions puff a foot high, old summer phlox tangle with four o'clocks growing like weeds in the weeds...
...Dixie Partridge Commonweal 18 July 16,1999...
...When you return, time has settled for darkness, and from sub-paths where you have been you bring a sense of both loss and gain from two worlds of need that have tried to join...
...Light coils back at edges of cloud...
...You cannot say how it happens: darkness becoming something else on its way to being light...
...New vines burn rust into thickets of asparagus, marigold gone unruly and raspberry reborn year after year...
...What becomes of cultivated toil, the plants it tenders to showpiece bloom...
...On a lime-green stump, moss thickens like short fur, and mushrooms rise in new flesh, old whiteness amid entanglements that simply move on toward a patience of creek stones...
...The dreamer becomes the dream and sets out to wander...
...Some moments it is enough to simply watch with empty hands and sometimes open eyes...
...He would like this fraying sprawl even now—how it quickens toward wildness along the south slope...
...I make my way through scents of green singe and mint and uproot nothing...
...the sun elongates at the horizon...
...Before the moon rises, scoured clean, the sky pales to a rinsed ink-blue...
...Garden berries picked wet in pails, weeding undone, you lie on the summer porch, eyes losing focus toward sights that lead into sleep and may never be remembered...
...The Wilderness of Common Days Brief rain in the trees, flicker of leaves, a few shadows returning...
Vol. 126 • July 1999 • No. 13
