"Paradise"
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What you wanted was simple: Darling, all day I've watched the garden make its way The garden is a mythical beast and a pilgrim. Barbeque eater, "This is paradise," you said, .
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
down the road. It stops at the houses
where the lights are on and the hose reel is tidy
and climbs to the windows to look inside
like a child with its eyes of flared rhododendrons
and sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombs
so buttered and brave the sweet peas gallop
and the undergrowths fizz through the fences
and pause at some to shake into asters and weep.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.
yankee doodle,
if the garden should leave
where would we age
and park our poodle?
a young expansive American saint.
And widened your arms to take it in,
that suburb, spread, with seas in it.