After Last Frost, Anniversary
       

After I mixed manure and lime
with coffee grounds and new soil,

after I turned the raised bed's
winter-tamped earth and mixed it loose

with my hands, after planting
the border marigolds and lemon-thyme,

sweet peppers and parsley, heirloom
tomatoes and the green tails of white onions,

I watered your perennial heart.
I've spent my whole life speaking in sunlight.

I am not the first to build a fence
around my garden, and for many seasons

I did not even need a gate. Anna,
I've spent years believing only in summer,

sunflowers nodding at my shoulders,
blackbirds eating their loose strife

of shells and seeds, feathers and chance.
Foolishly I believed if enough seeds

fell into a furrow, some find their feet.
From this seed we'll harvest sparrow clatter,

from this flower the scattered shells
of spent bees, the iridescence of wings

along the south windowsill, and from this?
The dry stalks the wind uses to chime against

all through the swollen, August heat.
I know it's a poor harvest, but I've learned

from this to live, and I'm sorry.
I'm sorry I do not know how long

I knelt there with only mud on my hands.
I do not know what root or loam slipped

the ring from my finger, but I dug them
all back up until I found it below

a marigold's tangle of roots, half buried,
half wink-bright reflection.

I took it with a handful of windswept
and these good drops of sweat

to the shed's slim lee of shade,
and, in the watering can, washed it clean,

knowing not a season in my life
has prepared me to love this long.

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Copyright © 2020 Lindsay Wilson All rights reserved
from Because the Dirt Here is Poor
The Main Street Rag
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission