this is not my bed of lavender
not my patch of reddened blackberries
and the wind here is a flood
in my chest a mechanical gust
it would tear off the loose rose petals
this is not what I want to watch
these faces hidden in pale blue
swatches of sky no mouths
little billows and sucks under eyes
under brows like the wings of swallows
and it’s no fellow gardener’s glove
whose hand now takes mine with its own
urgent grasp enough to wrest a whole
fennel bulb out into this bright
by no sun this is not my bed
not my last bed without dirt
or grass or last year’s arugula back
with its tiny off-white blooms where gladly
I would spread myself in the earth
but this clang-circus no one I love
in sight in the blur I can see the care flash
and dart I do see the bare blinking
hope unfamiliar eyes grow known
these hours in this garden its hum
hiss and ring I am danced- and flown-
around by breath’s devout deliverers
yes let this be the ground
I’ll rest if breath’s done filling
my blood let these desperate devoted
be my flowering’s minyan
________
Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks. Recent poems appear in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Tinderbox, Ruminate, and elsewhere. He edits poetry for Bracken.
Photograph by Francesca Iezzi.
