If a tree could be called a forest, my mother has a garden
beneath the back wall-
okra in a grow-bag, tomato in a pot.
Watered by the overflowing tank sometimes, & sometimes
by rain,
when the little things make it more than just a noise outside
the window- the whole family pausing, each from their own,
independently discovering a strange island-
Is it raining, mother asks.
It is raining, father answers.
It is lightning, sister says, & will thunder.
Little things-
like frogs climbing the wall next to the garden,
& bathroom doors swelling up in an available desire
of ajarness, a voluntary retirement. On sunnier days-
mother complains that the okras are too soft,
don't get all they want from true earth, & tomatoes
have to be picked orange, because it doesn't rhyme,
& squirrels bite into ripe red ones like a boast.
True earth-
I imagine trees talking in lava under crust,
getting all they want, not in sounds but in light or in things
between light & sound, like a thought, a smoke, a stuck-out tongue,
a secret.
I imagine trees doing hushed paperwork & then wash my face-
like a long song, or a short one sang slowly- with a soap
in the shape of things-
a rose, the pyramids, a Pokémon, the moon.
& at the midnight tick-tock of the clock I'm a brick more,
not of a wall but of something so expansive that it is, becomes,
the very opposite of a wall, something which can encapsulate
my mother's garden in all its glory & all its wants.
(First published in isacoustic)
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