After Burying Your Ashes

It’s the garden that has changed the most.

Not what I plant—that’s still

the herbs and vegetables we loved to eat together,

eggplants and thyme for nourishment,

garlic and jalapenos

to lift us out of the groove—

but the way everything

perpetually faces the same direction. Maybe it’s my imagination—

I’m a little disoriented myself.

I thought, time, you know, and structure

and wine, the good stuff you slow down

and pay attention to

and I’d recover. I get out. I see friends. I cook for myself as I did for us,

chicken scaloppini sautéed in butter and tarragon,

heirloom tomatoes with burrata and a basil chiffonade.

But can you see these beets? Half-moons. The scallions? They lean right.

I had to trellis the sweet peppers

so they wouldn’t topple onto the sunset. I get it, I roll to the middle of my own bed

every night, habit, not gravity, or habit and gravity,

juxtaposed, two of the saddest words I know.

Two of the sweetest: “Garden” and “new.”

I can smell the loam

on the other side of the creek, egregiously blank, sick to death

of being pinned down by sod that has never been stripped.

It is ready to breathe. We are pining to be.