Secret Garden

March 3 2018

The houses stand

shoulder-to-shoulder

on ample rectangular lots.

They look out

from dark impassive windows

on cul-de-sacs, and pampered dogs

and placid sunlit streets,

where tut-tutting people

steal glances upward.

Sturdy doors

securely shut,

facades all prim and neat.

The lawns are nicely cut

but oddly idiosyncratic  —

some, like putting greens, are emerald and plush,

while others are patchy, yellowed, overrun.

Where there are majestically spreading trees

the sun-starved grass is sparse,

and where the lawns have been covered

in paving-stone, or river-rock

absent, entirely.

While in back, behind high wooden fences

secret gardens flourish

cool and green and lush.

Where people gather

in small congenial groups,

intimate couples

seclude themselves.

Now, in this long fallow season

buried under snow;

a thick blanket of white

concealing warm dark soil.

An especially private place,

where a loose thatch

of dead brown grass

shelters small warm-blooded animals.

Where succulent worms nestle

and microbial life thrives

and matter decomposes.

Where dormant roots

await rebirth.

The architecture of snow;

intricate bonds of frozen water

with tiny pockets of air.

Protecting a subterranean garden

for months on end

in this winter of discontent.

Except for the heavy tread

where someone stepped

on a warm wet day;

the virgin snow compressed,

its fine crystalline lattice

shattered and crushed.

Frost penetrates.

Entire worlds

no one even knew of

laid waste.

Somewhere – it has already escaped my mind – I read “secret garden”: 2 simple words, but somehow highly evocative. Which is where the poem started. After which it wrote itself: no planning; no idea where it would lead. Writing like this is a pleasure: it feels as if you're taking dictation; the words seem to travel from inner consciousness, along your arm, and out through the pen. Only later do you bring some critical thought to the piece, ordering its content and refining the language.

In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that the poem would have taken the turn it did. Because it's so much my style: in its close observation, its fascination with microcosm, its idea of orders of magnitude and invisible worlds layered one on top of the other. Even in its somewhat supercilious take on bourgeois suburbia.

I like the unexpected and abrupt shifts: from front yard to back; from summer to winter; from the sun-lit world to the subterranean. I like the casual indifference of the footstep, as well as the disproportion between action and effect. I would hope the reader makes the inference at the end: that we are tiny insignificant creatures in a vast indifferent universe, subject to unimaginable contingency, or – if you are a believer – to the fickle moods of gods, so that the entire world contained in this small patch of soil could as easily be ours. (Yes, another of my recurring – and I imagine by this time tiresome – tropes: that, to quote myself, we are “tiny insignificant creatures in a vast indifferent universe”!)