Eve Remembers the August Garden
1.
In the end it was what we did not consider
the center of our happiness—the pear tree,
its wet-honey scent breaking over our bed
—that tipped the narrative from stillness to change.
2.
There was so little to tend to those days—the small garden,
dust on the high shelves. Otherwise, we spent afternoons
moving from stone patio to yard in various reclines.
When spurred to speak it was of that which existed—weather,
Echinacea at the far side of the lawn. Sometimes a window.
The swinging push-pull of a field filled with evening.
It would be wrong to assume we lacked the capacity
to comprehend, it was just that no part of us derived from outside
the garden. We had only the words for experience. Only
experience within the bounds of our immediate habitation.
3.
Still, we lived at the border of our own exterior. Light emptied
into other light, slipped out of morning. There was no distance.
No cracks in the floor for ants to ribbon through, no chipped plates,
no hem unraveling, no lost keys, no dry season, no ground
clotted coffee, no early frost, no black flies, no door jamb
swollen in the heat, no limbs and leaves softening against the sky,
darkening completely.
4.
Because it seemed to no longer encompass us, I felt ashamed
to have spent the summer reading naked in the grass. Why suddenly
did I want beyond that tree? Why, one August morning, did I bend
and, holding the hard fruit, make plans for when the flesh turned fragrant.
5.
It is all so terribly new. The daughter I had not imagined,
doll carriage tipped in the shadows of her body, yellow spoon
pinched under her arm, the sidewalk papered with petals
after a storm, poppies blinking grey-green and bare, the bright stain
on the tablecloth where jam has leaked from the jar.
Maybe gratitude is merely the short time suffering forgets
what it was about to say. Maybe remembrance is like waking
from the kind of dream that slowly pulls into focus,
only then becoming alien, strange. Already disassembling.
Madeline Miele grew up scrambling across Maine's rocky coast and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia. Her work has appeared in Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Stonecoast Review, Uppagus, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.