Читать книгу Chord - Rick Barot - Страница 10

ON GARDENS

When I read about the garden

designed to bloom only white flowers,

I think about the Spanish friar who saw one

of my grandmothers, two hundred years

removed, and fucked her. If you look

at the word colony far enough, you see it

travelling back to the Latin

of inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words

that would have meant something

to the friar, walking among the village girls

as though in a field of flowers, knowing

that fucking was one way of having

a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow

falling, which means that every

angry thought is as short-lived as a match.

The night is its own white garden:

snow on the fence, snow on the tree

stump, snow on the azalea bushes,

their leaves hanging down like green

bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair

to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics

of a garden, but somewhere between

what the eye sees and what the mind thinks

is the world, landscapes mangled

into sentences, one color read into rage.

When the neighbors complained

the roots of our cypress were buckling

their lot, my landlord cut the tree down.

I didn’t know a living thing three stories high

could be so silent, until it was gone.

Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light

in the windows, as though every sheet

of glass was having a migraine.

When I think about that grandmother

whose name I don’t even know, I think of

what it would mean to make a garden

that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas

of deepest purple, tulips like ravens.

Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks

placed on a plane of raked gravel,

the stray leaves cleared away every hour.

If you look at the word garden

deep enough, you see it blossoming

in an enclosure meant to keep out history

and disorder. Like the neighbors wanting

to keep the cypress out. Like the monks

arranging the stones into an image

of serenity. When the snow stops, I walk to see

the quiet that has colonized everything.

The main street is asleep, except for the bus

that goes by, bright as a cruise ship.

There are sheet-cakes of snow on top

of cars. In front of houses, each lawn

is as clean as paper, except where the first cat

or raccoon has walked across, each track

like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.