There needs to be a word, not for greeting or for parting, but for standing
still beside. I think of you while planting jasmine in the rain. My shirt damps
slowly down my back like a pale blue second skin, and my digging wakes
the worms. They flop and roil and wag their heads. They bend and burrow
deeper. I push my fingers deeper, too, grub down in clay for tiny bulbs like
garlic cloves someone packed in to purify a careless wound here long ago.
Hard to say it worked. They cleaned and greened the space, yet kept the cleft.
Each fist of soil brings up more bulbs, and I build two mountains of these
firm white stones. My fingers numb and brown. I did not imagine this
would take such time. Two years, I haven’t seen a bloom. Just weedy leaves
where I’d grow something else. But now here these heaps of stubborn life,
more than both hands full. Tender torn-earth’s pale pith, world-white heart.
I half hear their pulse through my palms. What to do? I cannot toss them out.
Seasons change before I want them to, yet earth overstays its welcome.
Honestly, it would be easier to say goodbye. Your presence makes me miss
you. I knew you and I have yet to know you are not half so lonely as I know
you. What a chasm for a verb to fill. I think of you while planting jasmine
in the rain, while kneeling in the muddy clay, shirt soaked to skin, and
understand the person who packed daffodils here years ago. Understand
the urge to jam even fists into these holes. Must everything unearthed endure?
–
Rebecca Edgren lives and writes in Jackson, TN, where she spends her spare time re-potting plants and reading about soil.