Annihilating All That's Made

Annihilating All That’s Made

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;

Andrew Marvell

My wife wanders in my life misplacing it,
tripping over old crumbled days,
missing dates, misnaming us.
She lives in a maze of gardens,
constructing gardens that she never grew,
alyssum boarding paths through blue hydrangea
beneath red roses trellised across the air.
We speak of neighbors who were never there
to take the dusty zinnias she gave,
the daffodils, the marigolds, the mums.
She speaks of willows grown aslant a brook
that drape the early tanagers
and house the thrush.

How have these strict gardens come to her,
who beckons me to ease upon her stately lawns,
but that their season awaits an advent,
as deserts bloom after a second storm.

For mind is fertile, prodigal, and formed,
spawning densely in torrential spring
or cracking seeds with breaking frosts—
witch hazel bursting in the deepest snow.
The mind is its own greenness everywhere,
prepared forever to determine space, remember love,
constructing the elegance it wants to know,
and then, like the excellence of leaves,
lets go.