Indifferent as God I plant
this stand of irises along the wall
of our foundation.
Transplants from a ravaged bed
driveway traffic forced to move, they’ve spent
a season in the dry, brown paper bag in our garage.
That dark despair, their purgatory, leads
to ressurection here
if faith redeems them,
and my wife is right.
I am a pessimist myself and so expect
long suffering to lead to longer death,
and so I plant in better soil
sometimes the bigger bulbs,
sometimes the small,
though neither has much chance to flourish here
in the original excavation’s dust bowl dirt
lain dormant in a pile beside the house,
weedless even, for so many years.
I do not plant to please myself;
my orchid wife wants daffodils to grow,
and grow they will,
unless the pachysandras crowd them out, as I expect,
as I expect that I’ll be kneeling here again
within a year
on all fours,
like a swaybacked horse
hitched by necessity to a rusty plow,
cursing a labor only love
could force upon a man my age,
or harsh words, undeserved,
uttered in a fit of masculine rage,
at everything and nothing, with regret,
trailing them like an echo but unheard.
No doubt, before these rootings fail to bloom
I’ll owe some greater penance than this toil
of burying battered bulbs in barren soil.
©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS
William John Watkins 