Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Torture Gardens

Mark Scroggin's poems are whiplashing back and forth inside my skull.  He calls them, in his new book, Torture Garden, "Naked City Pastorelles."  (Buy Mark's book here, via Small Press Distribution.)  They are perfectly shaped, formally elegant little explosions of violence, despair, wit, and observation, each contained within a strict stanza of seven four-to-six beat lines.  The idiom within each poem ranges from overheard conversation to French philosophy, from feces and spit to classical music.  This strategy, in which dark, energetic expression is confined within strict bounds, alludes to Naked City, John Zorn's experimental jazz/thrashcore band from the early 1990s,

especially their album Torture Garden. 

The "hardcore miniatures" on this album are, like Scroggins' poems (with whom they share many titles), tiny explosions of chaos, some only 30 seconds long, combining genres as disparate as jazz, classical, country, grindcore and punk.  In this the Naked City album is itself paying homage to an earlier Torture Garden, an 1899 French Decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau.  A satirical attack on the Dreyfus Affair, the book combines found text from several different sources and features a sadist/hysteric named Clara who achieves orgasm by watching scenes of torture in a beautiful garden.  Allegory, bien sûr:

"Ah, yes! the Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering."

[Auguste Rodin's illustration for Le jarden des supplices (Torture Garden).]

This is a tradition that's all about pushing the limits, shocking us out of sentimental illusion into Enlightenment forms of disappointed knowledge.  Scroggins turns the screw one more time by calling his poems "pastorelles:"  "A pastourelle is a simple poem set in a rustic scene, graceful and trifling in tone, describing the meeting of a man of culture and an ingenue, generally a shepherdess."  See the shepherdess on the cover of the Naked City album?  Yes, that's her: "The motif of the young girl scolded or beaten by her parents...on account of her lover is most frequent in the pastourelle."  To Scroggins' credit he avoids reproducing the misogyny of this tradition in his own poems, but he takes energy from its violent flouting of conventions of innocence, symbolized for him by the garden:

Luminous the division and joining

bone remains sliding screens of

landscape blanched alphabets les lumières

history revealed by pathology blesséd

art thou annunciation arrowheads catching

eyes vertical shaping water love

perdures contingencies of perception endured.

                                                        ("Numbskull")

This erudite mash-up of Enlightenment ("lumière") wisdom, Christian pietism, and garden design (vertical shaping water) testifies to the failure of any of these to console us for the losses (perdures) that can only be endured.  Art such as this that pulls away the curtain of artifice to reveal the powerless spectre behind it rides a fine paradoxical line; of course the careful "shaping" of the poem itself gives us a kind of pleasure, perhaps a painful one as its purposeful obscurity assaults our ignorance and its rapidly shifting linguistic registers knock us on one side of the head and then the other like an anvil dropped on Wile E. Coyote.  (Naked City was inspired by the composer of many of the Warner Brothers cartoons, and the cartoon violence is apparent in Scroggins' volume as well.)  Despite their attention to ugliness these poems can't help being beautiful.  The final stanza in this astonishingly accomplished volume could serve as its ars poetica:

"Gob of Spit"

Repeat flip rinse fist smear

shout move twist shift grimace

wince scrub dilate disarrange dismember

ravel translate offload unravel tear

stroke penetrate gesture finger retrace

retract gesticulate lick scale gut

retrace ejaculate rage respond repeat.

 

 

Mouth Carved Shut: Ekphrastic Poems

I wrote last month about the road trip I took with some friends to visit the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and participate in the ArtLines Juried Competition.  This week I've been working on those poems.  Here are three of them, along with the works that inspired them.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC HARP
Wrapped in the trunk of a Sapele tree
I heard an elephant bathing in
the rainforest bai.  Light poured down through the leafy
canopy; every beam sugared carbon
strings into mahogany heartwood.  This
was before the sawmills, the tree
hewn by hand, bush cricket my first music. 
Forged copper scraped me a hollow body,
elegant neck, elongated head achieved
by binding the infant skull.  The sharpest
blade cut me a mouth.  The green mantis
folded its arms and prayed.  I was made to be
African elsewhere.  I never learned
Mangbetu language, its voiced and unvoiced
trill.  I speak only with a mouth carved shut.

 

JADE HAND

This is my blade hand, cutting through
    rainforest vines
    enemy flesh
    false hope
    flattery
on my way to you.

Before it can fade, hand over
    the cheek slap
    what’s in your wallet
    peony bouquet
    our love
and I’ll keep it safe for you.

This jade hand-shaped pendant, look at it
    blue-green translucent
    ripple like ocean waves
    stiff with regal power
    empty to the gods
now drilled with holes, waving at you.

 

ALLEGORY OF EUROPE

It’s a gamble, a gaming
purse tossed on the floor
and open for business.

Blue velvet and the ace
of spades, space available
in another place not here.

Riches by chance, bitches!
Advance token, pass go,
past those other monkeys.

Keys to the city withheld,
meld Igbo and Bantu pell-
mell into Africa.  Scramble.

The Swan of Litchfield

This week's project (already past deadline!) is to write a book proposal for a new edition of poems by Anna Seward.  Here's an excerpt, followed by one of my favorite poems by the writer who made her small English city famous in the eighteenth century as "The Swan of Litchfield."

Seward (1742-1809) was one of the most popular and prolific poets of the early Romantic period.  So high was her reputation that none other than Sir Walter Scott edited the standard edition of her poems, the three-volume The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, in 1810.  Among other achievements, Seward was admired for renovating the sonnet form in English.  Arguably the dominant form in Renaissance English verse, the sonnet had gone into eclipse during the eighteenth century in favor of more public forms such as epic and satire.  Seward, along with two other important women poets, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith, initiated a renewed interest in the form, which then became a prominent aspect of nineteenth-century poetics. 

Seward was admired by canonical first-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, but her reputation went into decline with the emergence of the bardic role of the poet in later Romanticism.  Shelley, Keats and Byron, as famous for their athletic and sexual exploits as for their poetry, emphatically masculinized the image of the poet, and for the first time the term used to refer to women poets became the denigrating “poetess.”  The formative role of late eighteenth-century women poets in the emergence of Romanticism was obscured in literary history until the last thirty years of feminist scholarship.  Following on two decades of archival recovery work, the 1990s saw the publication of new editions of the work of Smith and Robinson (Oxford, 1993, ed. Curran; Broadview, 2000, ed. Pascoe).  What is missing is the third leg of the stool of the early Romantic sonnet revival:  a new edition of the poems of Anna Seward. 

I first became interested in Seward as a poet of love between women.  In my book Sister Arts, which includes a chapter on Seward, I describe the trope of "lesbian death wish elegy" in which the poet writes about the loss of her beloved after marriage, mourning it as if it were a death.  Here's one of Seward's notable contributions to the tradition.  It's addressed, as were many of her poems, to a beautiful younger woman, Honora Sneyd:

Sonnet XII

Chlll'd by unkind HONORA's alter'd eye,
"Why droops my heart with pining woe forlorn,"
Thankless for much of good?-what thousands, born
To ceaseless toll beneath this wintry sky,
Or to brave deathful oceans surging high,
Or fell Disease's fever'd rage to mourn,
How blest to them would seem my destiny!
How dear the comforts my rash sorrows scorn!-
Affection is repaid by causeless hate!
A plighted love is changed to cold disdain!
Yet suffer not thy wrongs to shroud thy fate,
But turn, my soul, to blessings which remain;
And let this truth the wise resolve create,
The Heart estranged no anguish can regain.

Poems in the Garden: Little Sparta

Today's post was inspired by a comment from a U.K. reader, Jerome Fletcher.  Mr. Fletcher pointed me to the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who first gained renown in the 1960s as a practitioner of concrete poetry.  Concrete poetry is the kind in which the layout and typography are part of the poem's meaning, so that it is a visual as well as linguistic object.  Here is one of Finlay's "poster poems," called "Acrobats:"

Its language not only describes but enacts tumbling, rendering the materiality of words concrete.

But sometimes Finlay (who died in 2006) actually makes poems out of concrete, or stone, or wood.  At Little Sparta, the garden he created in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh with his wife and collaborator Sue Finlay, garden spaces are designed around sculptural pieces engraved with poems.  (These great photos by Andrew Lawson are all from the Little Sparta Trust website.)

In this way, Little Sparta (so named in contrast to nearby Edinburgh, "the Athens of the North," with whom Finlay had been in decades-long conflict over issues of zoning and taxes) participates in a long tradition of poet-philosophers' gardens going back to classical times and epitomized in the eighteenth century by William Shenstone's The Leasowes.

Finlay's themes include pre-Socratic views of nature, the French Revolution, World War II, and the sea.  (Click on these horizontally-oriented shots to see them at full width.)

He works with master stonemasons and woodcarvers to produce virtuoso works of art.

Little Sparta is open to the public and I can't wait to visit it.

If Gardens Are Art, Who Is The Artist?

Yesterday I had the very great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on my book, Sister Arts.  Several of my graduate and undergraduate students were there, including Max, an especially engaged member of my lower-division Introduction to Creative Writing class.  Max asked the first question and it was probably the most productive of the whole discussion:  "If gardens are art, who is the artist?"

In some ways this is a very American question.  There is a long and distinguished tradition of English garden historians who have made careers out of studying gardens as art, an equation that is rarely questioned in English academic or museum contexts.  When I participated in a workshop at Sir John Soane's Museum to help plan the Mrs Delany and Her Circle exhibition, the group of about twenty curators and academics included a specialist in the history of grasses, one who studied shellwork, and Mark Laird of Harvard, who had just finished re-creating the eighteenth-century plantings at Painshill Park.  

But by the same token, the English themselves make a distinction between garden designers, whose work is studied by historians of landscape architecture like Laird,  and gardeners, those who carry out the "simple job" of maintaining the garden.  I've written here and here about the status of gardening as England's national pastime; working-class men who in America would be fixing cars on the weekends instead tend their roses,

or as in the case of this 2009 winner of the Scarisbrick Parish Best-Kept Garden Competition, their petunias.  At most, this work is regarded as craft rather than art; at least, as property maintenance, a kind of outdoor housework.  In the sister arts tradition of confounding the line between amateur and professional, art and craft, garden and landscape, we want want to claim these blokes as sister-artists.  (Wouldn't they be surprised.)

In answering Max's question I talked about three kinds of garden makers:  the wealthy patron of taste who envisions and funds the project of a major garden, such as Jane, Duchess of Northumberland, whose Alnwick Garden, which I wrote about here,  is the most ambitious contemporary landscape design in Europe:

the celebrity designer, like Capability Brown (1716-1783), seen here in a Nathaniel Dance portrait:

and the groundskeeper who actually plants, weeds, trims, waters and sweeps to keep the garden looking as intended, as here at Alnwick.

One of my favorite examples of how this third, often overlooked garden artist can affect meaning is on the UT campus just outside the English department.  UT's landscape is liberally strewn with statues by Pompeo Luigi Compini, dating from the early twentieth century; many of them are of rather dubious figures from Confederate history.  On the plaza in front of the Main Building, topped by the infamous UT Tower, two statues face down the quad to the Texas State Capitol a few blocks away:  Woodrow Wilson to the east, and Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederacy, to the west.  

The plaza's axial design means that the statues were meant to be a matched set, equally visible from the quad.  But over several years of teaching a course called Sister Arts in which I take students around campus to look at its design features, I've noticed that someone has trimmed the trees beside the Davis statue so that branches obscure its face when viewed from the quad.  You can see Woodrow Wilson just fine, but Davis has been literally thrust into the shadows by the anonymous garden artists of the UT groundskeeping crew.

Fifties Experimental Film: A Glimpse of the Garden

My friend Chad Bennett sent me a link to A Glimpse of the Garden,

a wild little movie by the mid-twentieth-century experimental filmmaker Marie Menken.

Born in 1909 in Brooklyn, Menken was associated with the fifties underground film scene in New York that also included Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Kenneth Anger (considered by many to be a forerunner of queer cinema).  She also appeared in several Warhol films herself.  Her famously rocky marriage to poet Willard Maas, said to be jealous of her greater success as an artist, was the inspiration for the toxic relationship between George and Martha in Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Yikes! 

I must say that in Mike Nichols' famous 1966 film version, Elizabeth Taylor does look a little like the picture above of Marie.  Maas has been identified as the off-camera presence providing fellatio to DeVeren Bookwaiter in Warhol's 1964 film Blow Job, and he also had an affair with botanist Rupert Barneby, whose lover Dwight Ripley is credited in Menken's film with giving her access to their garden. 

In this five-minute film, we see only plants and landscape and hear only birdsong; the sole indication of a human presence is the camera itself, proceeding at a walking pace along paths and across lawns, occasionally pausing to focus on a particular bloom or tree, and finally gazing at sunset over the garden.  Alternating between long, swooping shots, quick cuts between images, and steady-camera shots in which the only movement is the wind through the leaves and flowers, the film is formally ravishing.  Menken's work is noted for its respect for the objects filmed (as is also seen in her film Lights), her desire and ability to sense (or is it produce?) consciousness in inanimate objects.  This aesthetic is of a piece with the interest in materials and in abstraction of the New York School, Fluxus and Abstract Expressionist artists that formed part of Menken's circle.  Her painterly sense can also be seen in the title frame, above, which might, like her film Drips in Strips, be a humorous and loving tribute to Pollock-style drip painting. 

Sister artist, species fag-hag.

 

 

 

Gertrude Jekyll Garden at Lindisfarne Castle

We had spent most of the morning waiting in an Edinburgh queue for our rental car.  Then Milo had to go to the bathroom so we stopped in Dunbar on the Scottish coast, where we enjoyed the self-proclaimed "Best Loo of 2010" facilities. In addition to the loo (which really was pretty fantastic), Dunbar boasts the ruins of a "slighted" castle, one deliberately destroyed in 1568 to prevent it falling into enemy hands.  The castle is set on a promontory in Victoria Harbor, the day was fresh and beautiful, and we lingered.  The children rolled down the steep grassy embankment to the harbor again and again. 

So by the time we got to Lindisfarne Castle, our destination for the day, it was early afternoon.  I had plucked this site from the British Heritage Pass list in haste, thinking it had literary associations.  A Scott novel?  (It turned out to be where the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of England's finest surviving illuminated manuscripts, was created in the eighth century.  Oh well.)  The castle is on Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland, and can only be reached by a causeway.  The causeway, in turn, is accessible only at low tide.  And the tide comes back in at 3:45 p.m. in August. 

We raced across the causeway and skidded into the parking lot just in time to catch the last shuttle bus up to the castle.  Our first acquaintance with the truly impenetrable Northumberland accent was when the driver told us, not once but several times, that we would not get to the castle in time for the last entry at 2:30.  We just kept saying we wanted to try.

We hustled the children up the steep stone path to the castle entrance.  As we were showing our pass to get in, I noticed a pamphlet about the Gertrude Jekyll garden at Lindisfarne.  Which I had not known.  Anything.  About.

I pretty much lost my mind, abandoned Madge and the kids, and raced across the meadow to the small walled garden Jekyll created with her collaborator, the architect Edwin Lutyens, who renovated the castle in the Arts and Crafts style starting in 1901.  The two worked together on some famous commissions, but this one, for publishing magnate Edward Hudson, is one of the few that remains.  Hudson featured the work of Lutyens and Jekyll, as well as their writings on home and garden design, in his iconic magazine Country Life, confirming their status as households names of the English domestic arts. 

I like to think of Jekyll as the Gertrude Stein of English garden history.  (She never married, and wore men's boots.)

Although the garden had fallen into disrepair by mid-century, it was restored according to Jekyll's original plan when the property was acquired by the National Trust in 1944.  It's one of only four Jekyll gardens left in the world.  I had stumbled upon a jewel.

Jekyll's designs are known for their untouched sweeps of lawn and naturalistic planting.  Hudson had originally envisaged a vast landscaped area stretching from the original 16th-century walled garden all the way up to the castle walls, creating a unified work of art from house and garden as was typical of Lutyens-Jekyll collaborations.  But he ran out of money by the time Jekyll began work in 1911, so she was constrained to this rather boxy design.  Needless to say, she rocked it.

Jekyll's signature massed beds of one color,

and unique cultivars--she herself developed almost 60 new varieties and introduced hundreds more to English gardens from around the world--including woolly lambs-ear, a staple of Austin gardens--

bear all the marks of her signature style.  She used form as well as color to shape her garden artifacts.

I had only about fifteen minutes in this treasure-box before the tide rolled in.  I snapped pictures so quickly I actually broke my camera and had to use my iPhone for the rest of our trip.  Madge and the kids almost had to drive off the island without me.

All the more precious for that.

 

The Blush of Summer: Guest Blogger Richard Morrison

I'm delighted to welcome to Sister Arts my first guest blogger,  poet, photographer and editor Richard Morrison.  In this exquisite post, a prose poem with pictures, he introduces the floral and human delights of his Minneapolis garden.  Enjoy.

Forget the nearly naked boy next door as he stretches on the front lawn, preparing for his evening run around the lake.  He's an easy distraction from pulling up crabgrass. Suddenly it's summer in Minneapolis, ushered in by a week of thunderstorms and high humidity. Bare skin and endless endless peonies.

They've peaked, and demand harvesting, their heads heavy with rainwater, stems bowed over, snapped, hanging from the edge of their wire cages.  The twenty-somethings come and go, emerging fresh and eager in their running gear, returning in the twilight, torsos gleaming with sweat. Their appearances are fleeting.

 More enduring are the bearded irises, which have finally established themselves in the boulevard. They've lasted for weeks, having prevailed through the first heat wave as well as late-night revelers staggering back to their cars. The last sentinels of spring, but far more sensual than stoic. Their stalks rose from faux-tropical leaves, and reared up heads of yellow, white, and one variety endowed with every possible hue of purple.  Elaborate, frilled, furry, they are the epitome of perversity. Their upper petals erect and penetrable, while the lower ones hang down and display their "beards," attempting to lure in pollinators.

Garden flowers are masters of sublimation.

 We have a new neighbor in the apartments next door.  He's just moved in with his girlfriend, and they're an incredibly sexy pair.  Yet when he comes up the sidewalk and finds me fretting over the creeping thyme or wrestling with the garden hose, his eyes and smile are wide, genuine with possibility. 

What's different about this year's garden? We've ventured headlong into the cultivation of tomatoes, and now that all the beds are filled --  front and back, north and south -- I've learned the pleasures of digging things back up and rearranging them. But I look forward to nothing more than the return of the dahlias. Distinct and flamboyant is each and every bloom.  The first one to arrive goes by the name of "Boom Boom Red."

They’ll carry us all the way to first frost.

 

Drawing in the Landscape: Rachael Shannon's Lesbian Land

Last summer, I gave a gallery talk at Women and Their Work called "A Brief History of Queer Space," in conjunction with Leah DeVun's exhibition about the Lesbian Land movement of the 1970s and 1980s, "Our Hands on Each Other."  At the time, Leah and I argued in a friendly way about whether or not the practice of lesbians creating communes was dying.  Leah told me that the women in the wilderness and backwoods communities she had visited were concerned about their legacy; either they did not have children, or their children were not interested in going "back to the land."  My point was that while those particular groups of people might be struggling, the concept of lesbian land lived on, both on a large scale, such as the fabled Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and in smaller-scale experiments in living like Rachael Shannon's small East Side lot, which she refers to as her "land."  I finally got a chance to visit Rachael's land this week, just as she gets ready to leave it to spend two years in Baltimore getting an M.F.A. in Community Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

This mirror leans against the fence near Rachael's outdoor shower.  First at Darcee Douglass's iconic lesbian compound on East Riverside and later as an attender and worker (or "festie") at Michigan, Rachael grew to love showering outdoors and built her own version on East 16th St.

She showers here every morning and says she has never been bothered by or bothered her nieghbors (with whom she is very close)--although she does avoid showering on Friday mornings when the rather high-sitting trash truck rolls by her fence.  (Well, one time she did have a problem with a neighbor, or maybe just a passer-by, who stole the first crop of green pears from her front-yard pear tree.

Her painted response earned her the local nickname The Pear Lady.)

In general, though, Rachael doesn't like hard-and-fast boundaries like fences.  She says she was first attracted to this neighborhood when she bought the house--then "a shack"--in 2002

in part because the unfenced yards flowing from one household to the next reminded her of the small Texas town of Wharton, where her dad grew up.  Rachael's parents and grandparents are all designers, makers, builders, not professionally but as a way of life.  Rachael recently visited her 91-year-old grandfather on the land he visits every day to watch the sunrise and sunset.  He knows the birds, animals and plants on the property and keeps track of them all.  This kind of "piddling and tweaking" is also how Rachael describes her ongoing projects around her land--including planting this sago given to her by her grandfather:

Surrounding Rachael's small, always-in-renovation cottage is a series of other buildings.  Her studio is in the house, and that's where her roommate also lives; Rachel herself sleeps in a trailer,

decorated with flats from this year's Gay by GayGay festival in Austin.  There's also a silo,

currently used for storage but which Rachael ultimately envisions as studio and living space as well.  And here's the bike shed she just built with her dad:

Rachael's love for adding these outbuildings reminds me of a series by iconic lesbian-feminist photographer Tee Corinne that commemmorated the storage tanks and yurts of her Oregon back-to-the-land community.  I wrote a little bit about those photographs in the conclusion to my book.

Rachael's design sense is organic, sensual, curved.  She says there was not much she could do about the squareness of the house--"you just had to work with the box"--but her plantings and outdoor architecture have a rolling, sinuous quality, like Hogarth's "line of beauty".

Rachael calls her design practice "drawing in the landscape,"

and says she is seeking a homey, inviting, yet crafted and intentional feel.  Her garden is a wonderful place to visit.  Rachael will be leaving it in other hands for the next couple of years but she says she's like "a kite on a string"--she'll keep coming back to her Austin land and with the help of her community, it will continue to evolve and provide a home for many.

 

 

"desire exceeds the bounds of any garden": Ed Madden's Prodigal: Variations

Last weekend when I interviewed my friend Neville about his garden for this blog, he asked, "What makes a queer garden different from a straight garden?"  I rambled a bit about how it could be a matter of who uses the garden and how, or a matter of how the garden is made (I mentioned that Neville's own garden includes sisterly-sissy elements such as his grandmothers' favorite plants and some canna lilies he dug up from the yard of my old house when we moved), or the use of certain well-known erotic shapes, like the arched grotto entrance.  But ultimately, I made my away around to saying something about how a garden is always riding the line between nature and culture, between order and chaos, between art and life.  It's art in a living medium that simply obeys its own unruly, asocial sexual laws (of reproduction and growth).  So in that way, every garden is a queer garden.

What a pleasure, then, to read Ed Madden's new book and find a similar idea encapsulated so beautifully in the quotation in my title.  Ed, who was one of a beloved band of queer UT graduate students who befriended me when I first arrived in Austin in 1991, is now an English professor at the University of South Carolina.  He's the author of a critical study of modernism, Tiresian Poetics, and a previous book of poems, Signals, which won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize.  His new book, Prodigal: Variations, explores the very queer territory of intra-family erotics and does so through memories and experiences of plant, garden and farm.

Ed was raised by conservative Christians on a farm in Arkansas, and he beautifully evokes the fear of his father's wrath that shaped his gay childhood in the opening poem, "Sacrifice:"

When my father bound me, I submitted,

 

closed my eyes to the lifted knife in his fist.

Even now, the cords still hold my wrists,

 

rough ropes of love.  My chest is bare,

my heart lies open.  He loves his god more

 

than me.  I open my eyes, watch my father

raise his fist against a bright and bitter

 

sky, no angel there to stay his hand.

The speaker's childhood farm, like all farms, is a place of both lush growth and violent death, as in these lines from "Osage orange:"

This is eating tomatoes from the vine.  This is the cutworm,

this viscous smear of green.  This is killing worms.

This is breaking windows in the pig house.

Many of these poems were written while Ed was the poet-in-residence at the Riverbanks Botanical Garden in Columbia, South Carolina,

and here the poet, still struggling with the legacy of love and anger bequeathed him by his father, sees clearly how this laid the groundwork for a satisfying intimacy with another man as an adult.  In the garden, and with his lover, he is able to "learn the vocabulary of sweetness."  He asks,

How do I know I will miss you?

 

And why does it come to me

in a garden, of all places?

These lovely, grave, formal poems belong in the Sister Arts tradition in which garden art is poetic, philosophical, even theological, offering an occasion for us to meditate on our deepest and hardest truths, and to experience the out-of-bounds wildness of being alive.