Subtext
Today spirea and salvia both found homes in my garden while today I dug my bare hands raw in the dirt and even so my motherless friend and I wandered the greenhouse for the people we’d been I could not soothe whatever ache seeped out of old stopping at roadside stands for creeping thyme, lemon balm wounds nicked on rocks, delicate tendrils of desire and tri-colored sage I had no use for except for gawking snapped by shovel tip or reckless digging while oh, crazy nature with her cool girl colors and vintage hats—my skin split at the webbing between thumb and hand and we loaded my minivan which once held children
the spot my babies used to press against my chin while filled with fronds and delphinium spires, electric 80s mascara blue nursing as though once we had been joined that way which the kind of glowing color which demanded I buy the plant is really the way most of parenting feels as they and I age which even though I’ve been told often they are difficult to grow which is
is to say I feel the trace of them everywhere and yet already
sort of how everything is, right? I mean what have you grown gone from me so that I dream always of digging—through that hands-on-hips-chin-jutting you say so easy, so so easy just laundry, unending suitcases full of items that are not mine, barely had to do anything and as I drove, I worried clawing through thick brush or gasping into brackish water about the delphinium’s tall bloom, the steeple of its floral church and today I dig and find freedom in planting pineapple sage a shocking green
and how long I would have it, how long it would last
whose garish leaves are the flamboyant aunt everyone wanted
in my garden and if I would remember how to care and I wish to wish only for attainable things and then second for such a graceful, unlikely thing—petal whorls, pedicel, crown, feeder guess if that goes against the meaning of wishes which is right and anchor roots, eyes, bracts and those tinier leaves called bracteoles when I dig so hard the skin opens, blood goes into the ground plus nectaries—I recited words as though knowing the parts of a thing makes it
like I’m trying to demonstrate my commitment to a garden
somehow easier to understand or to grow when really there must I inherited from a stranger and set right to making my own though always be a freedom of soil, amended and rich, light enough, shade too and I didn’t think I’d like putting more living things into the world which
with all that a degree of magic such that anything born
require care, their instructions limited and only partly useful
ought to arrive with top hat, nose twitching
as though deciding upon charm or destruction at any given moment
like some top-hatted rabbit who may or may not chew its way
through my newly planted plants as though digging for blood.
In our dream band, on glass harmonica:
Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of more than twenty books. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Journal of the American Medical Association among other places as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio. Her novel, The Lioness of Boston, based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner, is in its sixth printing. emilyfranklin.com
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 