Dear Reader,
Where I live there isn’t much greenery. Like most streets in Queens, my block is lined with a few trees, the last vestige of our natural world growing up from between the cement lining the street. The lack of natural vegetation is one of the downsides of living in a big city like New York and it’s probably why much of my poetry is filled with pastoral longing, and why the writing of men like Jim Harrison and John Muir speaks so deeply to me.
I would be starved for nature if it werent for my neighbors backyard. He keeps a small garden, growing flowers and other odd bushes. In the spring I watch him prepare his garden, bending over backward to dig up dirt and pull up weeds. Hes older, most likley in his 70’s, but with the limber frame of a much a younger man he faithfully tends his garden, and every moring I can spy him on his knees with his hands in the dirt getting dirty, his smiling face slick with sweat.
This poem, which was first featured in Duck Head Journal last September, captures my neighbor in his garden, and imagines a conversation between a city kid who longs for the earth and an old man who refuses to abandon the soil from which he was made.
Enoy!
THE GARDEN TOAD From my window, he looked like a toad, bent over his flower bed in a green sweater, head hidden from the sun, wrapped in a brown baseball cap. He was pulling up weeds. His black hands were covered in dirt as he broke up the earth to expel the infidels— crabgrass, pigweed, and a troublesome patch of shepherd's purse. He stuffed them into a black garbage bag. Its jaws unhinged and hungry, all contorted and fat, bursting at the seams like the body of a bloated corpse. Then, when he was done, he slung the beast over his back and slumped under the weight. Bowled over like a reed in the wind, struggling to stay aloft. I offered to lend him a weed whacker, thinking that'd be better for his back. But when I brought it up, he quietly declined, saying the same hands that sow the seed should be willing to pull up weeds. Reward without toil is foolish. Beauty without pain is greed.
Recent Publications:
Check out my new poem, Finals, in Cathexis Northwest Press's latest issue.
Recommended Reading:
I had some time to do some reading over the break. Here are a few things I read that I want to recommend to you:
- George Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest
- Jim Harrison, The Search for the Genuine
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (Book I)
Writing Update:
Still editing my novel. Maybe I’ll preview a chapter soon? I’ve also made some progress on my new poetry collection. It’s quite different from my last two books, and I’m excited to share it with you soon.