Monthly Archives: March 2013

In the garden

There is a large bit of garden out behind the Zen Center, owned by a loose family of semi-feral cats and a heckling gallery of birds. A community garden, largely derelict, displays raised beds in the middle of it: some with spindly trellises, most with no memory of former cultivation. A thin plastic shed spills gardening oddities onto the ground, like an installation piece by a post-modern farmer. Once Nathanial, the darling two-year-old who lives next door, got into the installation piece and made it interactive. His mother indulged him until he tried to pry a rusted pitchfork out of the ground.

The cats are shy, the birds are not. How many cats patrol the tangled fen that runs between Yale properties on the upside of the hill opposite us and the community garden, I couldn’t say. They were all feral at one point but a local humane coalition gathered them together, spayed or neutered and vaccinated them, and now provides food, water, and cat-boxes. I think some of the cats, like the thin kittenish orange who limps and twitches his way between the garden and the houses across the way, are simply visitors who take advantage of the free food. Others, like the knobby marmalade who’s too old to care and too slow to run away from me in any case, are certainly permanent residents of the three cat-boxes behind the Zen Center shed. I know there’s a black tom and another marmalade, large and wary, who are also resident. And so too is the little gray and the smaller black who most often occupy the sunny back porch two houses over; but there may be more. They give me berth but seem to be warming up. By that I mean that in six months of hearing me approach to take out the Center compost and scattering once I rounded the corner of the shed, they now watch me for two or three breaths before slinking off to the garden periphery. Except that bony old marmalade. He’s stayed with me most of the afternoon today, although he declined my offer of a guacamole-covered chip. He walked gingerly back and forth behind me, sampling food and water, a sunny ledge and the cat-box. Another couple cats materialized, gazed on me, and crept away again.

The birds. They’re various. I’m not a birder, so I don’t know exactly, but I’ve seen hawks, male and female cardinals, jays, grackles, some medium-sized and several smaller songbirds including a delightful one with a rose breast and a smallish crest, and cedar waxwings. I’ve also heard woodpeckers. The birds steal the cat food. They call across the fens. They make this space remarkable: I can still hear the cars going on Prospect Street, down from the Divinity School, past the chemistry and physics labs, but now they are the background noise. This reverses the usual relationship in this largely urban environment. Right now it’s mostly squirrels argueing in the trees up the hill, bird-song, and the long exhalation of the afternoon.

The wind’s moving the thin branches of the trees over one another, like bony fingers, creaking, squeaking.

I’m thinking of May Sarton, and the Journal of a Solitude I read many years ago. Solitude: what is it, exactly?

The crocuses have come up in plentitude and fullness. I think another four days, and they will begin to lose their petals, their hardiness sunk to tender, fragile mortality. Then the daffodils will bloom, the tulips, but especially the daffodils, all over this city. And then it will be spring, finally, perhaps.

Compline, Christ Church, Palm Sunday

I wrote you a poem because
I don’t believe in spells or prayers;
it was all I had.

from Twelve Simple Songs by Dave Bonta

The embryo of song, a single note. The ancestor of narrative, a single voice, first, against the smokey incensed dark. The ceiling has beams they are like ribs, this church is a body and the lights are dying low. I am dying low. In song words unfurl and with them meaning unspools like a dropped bobbin, rolling away to echo ping against the floor. And still the single voice holds tenuous but holds. Flicker. Shadows: tenebrae. This is love. This is not love. A single note is no longer held but falls. Before it resurrects into silence another voice catches, carries on. This is love. Still no resolution. Sound preceedes words, a lengthening spine of vowels and knobby consonants, a body that is all blood and muscle and no joints. Words do not coagulate into meaning. Hemophiliac love. Blessed are the poor in spirit. There is a draft from the door. The flames flicker but do not go out. Now the voices swell full. The Laozi said what is empty is full, emptiness is fullness. Barren. I am poor as an abyss, poor as the cracked land, brittle as the first skin of ice on the water, fragile as ash. Vowels and consonants don’t spell the words but they carry us over the long dark between the vault and the pricks of votive light. Was that a prayer? This is love.