Overgrown - Oct 22 2024

 

Overgrown

Oct 22 2024

The For Sale sign was nailed to a tree.

A sturdy white pine

I eventually recognized

as the sapling we once planted

for summer shade.

And, of course, because we both love trees

and are prone to excess

and put in many more.

The vegetable garden

she so meticulously tended

was wildly overgrown

behind a badly leaning fence.

The state of neglect

would have gutted her,

while I instantly missed

the succulent tomatoes

and butternut squash

I hadn’t tasted in years.

The grass needed cutting

and wet leaves had piled up,

rotting under their weight.

The house looked small;

but of course, it always does

when you’ve been absent so long.

Priced to sell

because the market was soft.

And because no one really wanted to buy

  —  too old, too far,

too hard to keep up.

The ashes

were still sitting in a bag

in the back of the car.

I’d thought the garden would be perfect

but not like this.

So I sprinkled them, as best I could

at the base of that tree.

You’d be surprised, how awkward that is;

how the ashes clump and cling,

how even a mild breeze

can take them.

A white pine,

a regal evergreen

that grows strong, and true

and easily outlives us.

Not that they’re eternal, of course

nothing is.

But at least a good resting place

on her way to whatever

awaits us in the end.

The poem ends more hopefully than I actually believe. Which is that nothing awaits us, there is no afterlife, and death is final. Our atoms live on, our molecules may; but our consciousness is expunged, annihilated, extinguished. The closest we can get to eternity is in the memories of others, and in the works we’ve left behind.

Here, I suppose the garden can be seen as a metaphor for finality, as well as emblematic — if you suffer from the same existential angst as me — of life’s ultimate meaninglessness. Or at least that life happens in the now and not posterity, so we should take what we can from the moments. The tree, though, is a counterweight: it embodies a kind of hopefulness. I think it also humbles — by its example of a different order of time and entirely different way of life — the sense of centrality and self-importance with which we human beings flatter ourselves.

The narrator clearly feels some guilt for his prolonged absence. So the tree — present, rooted, steadfast — also stands as a rebuke. A novel or short story would explore this. A poem simply hints, leaving it to the reader to fill in the blanks however she wishes. Perhaps an opening for self-reflection. This is the best part o f poetry: what it leaves out; how it says more with less. (Not to mention how such a short form of literary expression suits writers like me who need instant gratification and have short attention spans!)

I hate to admit that, since I’ve never done or even seen this, my image of the ashes being scattered is lifted from the scene with John Goodman in The Big Lebowski. “Admit” because in contrast to the sombre tone of the poem, that scene is absolutely hilarious!

The inspiration for the poem itself came from just a single line in a New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman about his penchant for photography and documenting the everyday: I have a photograph of my mother’s abandoned vegetable garden, run to riot after she fell ill; it’s probably the saddest in my archive. The economy and evocative depth of this simple sentence stopped me cold. I immediately went back and reread. And by the end of the essay, it kept sticking with me. That’s all it sometimes takes for a poem!

(https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/what-can-you-learn-from-photographing-your-life)