In My Own Backyard


And now that I'm privy to the secret

(about which the ego still turns
like a beacon on passing cargoes
that it, above all, surely stands
                                        on solid ground)

of the large tree in my own backyard,
a nuisance to some, 'big weed' they say,
of its own crises, in a moment through which
the world turned and called its name,
as if the world, itself,
                                 were solid ground.

Not so, a decade ago (more it seems,
with weeds you can never be sure)
notice was served that the lot
behind my place was to be sold,

as if stolen from dream: the fruit of
the orchard I would someday attach;
the deep sense of trail annexation would make,
a campfire in the distance through a grove of cedar
I would plant in the middle of this large city
of little account, in a neighborhood held
in low esteem, freeway-locked and land-banked
in the vaults of eastern lawyers
                                        biding time.

Under the frail moon over my backyard.
Who could possibly have want at that?

Now gone, as surely as Cage's mushrooms.
And, just as certainly, someone was laughing at me,
"Ha, ha! Your idyll is gone! Perhaps the mayor,
whose toes I stepped sorely the season before,
in futile neighborhood activism ('sewing seeds'
they said, to later console me - those who thought
consolation might put me back on
                                                solid ground.)

But no good would come of that. I knew what solid
ground felt like. I'd dreamed it for years, fortressed
with some crazy brambled idea that the lot, on which I'd
someday stand my ground, undersized and overgrown,
surely little more than a fading dotted line that connects
my own small sense of world (like the nearby sewer
to god-knows-where and the platt maps don't say),
was surely too small to squeeze past the thorny gates
of variance permits by which such designs are reached.

But, then
somebody knew somebody,

and I was, again, fighting a battle in a war long lost,
a done deal before any troops arrived; what remained,
like a battle flag, the 'intent to build' notice informing
us that it would be a sensitive addition, aesthetically
consistent; in keeping with the neighborhood plan.

(one wonders if that meant it would have built-in gun ports;
a triple strength steel door, abused children permanently
in-residence and weekly domestic battles that spilled onto
occasional fountains of gunfire and crowds of onlookers?)

fat chance it would ever be as dumply charming
as my own dump -
still,)

till the secret of 'undersized' revealed itself,
like the venom of cobras rising from baskets,
I had not considered there were two stories -

one blocking forever the view of open sky
and the distant parapets of imagination
from which I'd hunted so many ghazals
and gathered lightning from the mountains
into sacks of haiku and country lanes;

the other, in clods of new black earth , when
the wheels in the factories of spring begin to turn
and the thin tissue of a late frost gives it up
to the warm mists rising from my pond;

when I would first kiss the ground, shake my rattles
before the southern sky, piss on the winter compost
and do other silly things; shout ecstasy before fertility
shrines brought back from Walter's plenty-rice farm
in the wilder of Liberia - guaranteed by his in-country wife,

(who proved the point one night when Walter, too tired
from cutting a third crop of lush See-Never-Done surplus,
invited Mousa to try me out, left the room with a hale
'I go come' as if he was simply employing the familiar charm
of Liberian English, its reluctance to declare finality
about anything that didn't at least comfort in promise
the return to the status quo --

or deliberately omitting the indicative pronoun
in ribald declaration of the evening's role assignments,
I go, (you) cum. )

I prayed and the idols worked - in a decade,
they had not failed me - the tambourines clattered,
the flutes whistled, clothes came off
as the sun rose higher, blossoms fell,
vines wrapped, fruits thickened in ovoid sacs,
my hands, smeared with sticky red passion-flower gel,
would piston abandon to the sounds of nearby
dragonflies, until the seed would fly or, (if I got lucky)
my latest chance encounter saw past the dump&clutter
to what rascal a garden can really be - then we'd throw
ourselves on baskets of fresh picked blackberries
(bigger than her thumbs) and howl till the dogs
down the block went crazy and the neighbors…
well, they said nothing - and we'd smile at that.

'Sensitive plans', opened before me, left no doubt;
a 'second story' job that explained in miracles
of pumpkins, old shoes, Hubbard's cupboard
and the manifold wonders of packing dense numbers -

…two stories with a huge picture window in back,
no room for a backyard - just a dandy view of mine:

the sacred plants, secret burls; yes,
a hummingbird jamboree and Four O'clocks
in a frenzy to make it with the bees before sundown;
a couple of crazy aborigines smeared with berry juice
or, (if not lucky) pumping the afternoon away
in a sun-drenched lawn chair;

soon to be transformed into a small cell in the panopticon
of community, tenants with children and baskets of shame.
Weapons of mass destruction to be used in the

      WAR

the ax missing my forhead by little more
than the distance between winter and spring
in a check-swing, "What the hell do you think
you're doing?"

(I wouldn't learn about 'garden regulators'
or 'apical moments' for a long while yet);

but my head must have sat on the top
of that back fence like a disembodied
moon. The ax-man stared and I felt
the hand of sky press the apical moment
into that sapling - not of lightning, or storm
or earthly need; but life, itself now
become the hologram in every bend and break;
for the rest of its natural, branching life.

"Your house doesn't even come to this fence,
why cut it down?"

Later, much later, Edna would posit,
"The seasons of dirt aren't like those other ones.
Filled with creatures breathing through her lungs,
they cry worlds; and to each reason there is a word."

The word magic also came later, under her tutelage.
But even then, with little more than a larynx of lead,
I had learned a few incantations of my own.

"PRIVACY," "INTRUSION," "OVERUSE"

conjured demons only a sane man would respect.
The men of city hall, the developers of distant villages,
these men weren't sane. They sat there, unmoved.

"aesthetic sensitivity" kept glaring from the page
in the permit office and something kept kicking me
under the table. "UGLY!" I cried, "IT'S UGLY."
as though speaking in tongues, torn from me
by some unmemoried swollen moon - "that tree;
it's native, historical and irreplaceably beautiful.
The rest of this is, the rest of this is, is ugly."

And the windows were turned to the east - out of sight,
and the cheap siding was turned brown and green,
and the fence lengthened and talled against the rules,
and the tree grew - 60 feet in the next five years,
until, limb by limb, the seasons of the imagination
returned

and only in the deepest of the barren months -
though I no longer plucked sonnets from distant whispers
of Sierra foothills, nor made the journeys to the polar skies -
only then, when leaf abandoned branches that would not support them,
when myth made of words burned in the smoky fires of mid-winter haze,
was the trick revealed - a world projected on a Wayang screen -
where I could spend the better part of the year listening to the earth
breathing the season's want, wrap red flags about the stalks of okra,
watch fish catch globs of fresh sperm in unlicensed pagan ritual,

till the two stories revealed a garden regulated by the imagination:
a distant forest cottage, perhaps, covered with vine and moss thatch;
beyond the cedar grove, the orchard, the little brook beyond
where the superstructures of change, filled with irreverent need,

gave way. Seamlessly,
I would throw chance seed at
The War Against The Imagination


                                                                     and cling to that solid ground
                                                                     now thick-rooted in the sky.

                                                                    





Available works in the 'Edna Series'

Millenniums's Are Made…

In My Own Backyard
Old Bole

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