Contemplating Permanence
March 11 2015


The front yard
of my narrow city lot
is temperamental grass.
Which never looks well,
pale and wan
in the heat and smog
hemmed-in by shadow.

So I've torn out the lawn.
Dug up dry compacted soil.

Yanked crabgrass,
unreeling in long tenacious strings
that slip, and catch, like cogwheels.
Pulled dandelions,
thick fibrous roots

dangling like daggers.  

I am an ancient conqueror
salting the earth.

A rock garden has taken its place.
With its pleasing geometry.
Its packed paths
of sterile sand
culled of growth.
Its smooth round stones
honed

by eons of water.

And its Zen-like capacity
for stillness.

Rain washed rocks
gleaming with sunlight,

brown and grey
ochre and rust.
Hot in summer

and warm at dusk

and cold as night.
Then all winter, resting beneath the snow,
with a steady certainty
of which I am envious.

Which reminds me of my insignificance.
From the needy grass I tended
to this self-sufficient stone,
which sits
oblivious of me.
Our puny lives, against rock's dense gravity
outlasting us all.

But the illusion of order
is also my conceit,
river rocks
ripped from their cool streams
and positioned by me,
as if nature's only purpose
were to please the eye,
confirm my mastery
over all I see.

Yet here I find myself
down on my knees,
tearing weeds
from my perfect garden
of perennial rock.
Which I thought had freed this citizen-philosopher
from lawn care,
the imperative
of growth at any cost.

So hard as I try
to contemplate permanence
my garden resists.
Because even rocks
cannot calm time.
And metastatic nature persists,
no less oblivious.


Another poem about man's hubris, his illusion of agency.

I like the vaguely querulous tone of frustration I think you can sense in the 2 closing stanzas : he wants to be all spiritual and Zen-like, but the outside world is too much with him. When all along, the calm and detachment are to be found within, not without.

In real life, I replaced my grass with low-growing junipers, not rocks. I thought I had forever freed myself from weeding and watering, cutting and fertilizing. Low maintenance nirvana. …Not a chance. The rest of it, yes. But weeds still grow unchecked, and without my manual labour may very well have choked the life out of my beautiful junipers.