“All my hard little tears…”*
“Sunflowers in Blue Vase” by Kirsten Walter
A garden can sidle into the place of more than a garden if you aren’t careful. It’s just as easy to make a metaphor of the garden as it is to want more garden. But I can gather no more space here at the edge of the city than I can turn the garden into a metaphor for living today.
This morning every task was one rooted in violence: trim back, pull, hack, saw, tear out, deadhead. August has gathered an abundance and then singed it and I have charged myself with tidying up after it. It sounds nothing like love, but that’s all it felt of.
Today, the garden kept me from looking up the ways this new diagnosis will change the borders of my life. It kept me from typing “how long…,” “why does….,” “when will….” into the search bar. Instead of following those questions to their inevitable ends, I cleaned up the garden dying in the heat. See, right there, how quickly I could turn to metaphor? But really, cleaning up in anticipation of the coming autumn is all it was.
In return for my labors, two splinters, a large butternut squash, cascades of magenta amaranth, a bowl of Sungold tomatoes, a handful of figs, golden raspberries eaten straight off the bush, and enough sweat dripping down my back to remind me you are alive. You are so uncomfortably alive.
Today, the work of the garden has delivered me from the basest part of myself, has given me enough to eat, provided distraction from how this all ends. But when I was done and had washed my hands and arms, when I had cleaned the produce and eaten the figs with coffee, I still sat down with myself and decided I, like the garden, want another season here. No matter how uncomfortable, no matter how it ends. And that maybe, metaphors aren’t the worst way to survive.
*Title taken from a line in “Sunflowers” by Jenny George.
Sunflowers
I’m in the world but I still want the world.
I’m full of longing and can’t move,
enthralled in the garden. Having died
all the way back to the root, I grow again
into a version of the thing I love. I’m her
and not her, hermaphrodite with a heart
like a plateful of black flames.
The bees inspect me like doctors.
All my hard little tears, future selves
who haven’t grown. Bedclothes swell on the line
while around me giant sunflowers burn
through their masks of radiant desire.
