from Garden
The accident of ownership issues a market. Last year’s seed
sprouts from a silo padlock. The problem of objects in the
garden becomes not what they are, beneath their watery
surfaces, but who husbands them. They tell me a tree has
nothing to have; meanwhile I labor under the shade of
reciprocity. Trim, mow, own. I imagine the world exactly as
it is, then heaven as a grid overlaying it. Sin of commission instead.
The garden follows its law of ornamentation; I follow a
horticulture of logic. Purple stains all over my book. Dipping
my thumb in a bowl, I write through the berry: loss is always
inaugural. Crows hop around the garden, and I imagine
sleeping in the earth until they die. Is it elegy or augury? I
can’t quite read my own sentence. Is the garden dying or
being born? My writing hand, winter numb, drops out of the
narrative—this is one example of the author’s failure to plot.
Let’s return to the eccentric square. Let’s fall back
and regroup over lunch. You collect purple globes from the
plum tree, and they melt tasteless on my palate. To what
border did you flee, anthocyanin? A fucked-up building?
Madder root, rot of the subject… I forget what I was saying.
Here, economies of grids predominate; here there’s neglect
and weird collapse. I walk on all fours in a cloud of surplus.
I crawl in the interest of the dead.
Lindsey Webb is the author of a chapbook, House (Ghost Proposal, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, jubilat, and Vestiges, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.