Toads in my mother’s ‘s garden talked
inside the ivy along the brick.
Each in his personal thicket murmuring judgments
wigwagged a green umbrella tilting its glossy ribs.
Now and then one of them coughed in mid-sentence,
carelessly dozed, and was torn by the cat.
A ginkgo grew in my mother’s garden,
odd, old, immense;
raising such long-stemmed fans as queens
would choose to air their faces with
and, at what time of the year I cannot remember,
bringing forth scrotal fruits which stank on the branch.
Wherever the burst pulp dropped, the grass died down in alarm.
Under the starchy lilacs, under the bee-filled quinces
violets at the foot of my mother’s garden
crept in the wet, their root systems working
secretly; violets that I picked
pleadingly for her sick headaches
with long stems and collars of leaves
to the end of my days.
On the steep cut of a slope which ran
from my mother’s garden up into the convent laundry-yard,
there in full sight of the billowing
longjohn muslins of nuns,
May was a riot of stars-of-Bethlehem.
Thicker than lambs in clover, each cup an act of worship,
the flowers bloomed hard on the side of the heathen
but never ran over the nose of the hill.
Notice I say my mother’s garden
again and again, advisedly!
She is here, she walks here in the evening.
She scolds the common blue flags for putting up spears.
In rough gloves she wrestles the roses,
at supper-time hauls in the sun.
The violets cease their invasion now as she passes.
Bees in mid-air turn to mind her;
they enter the Japanese quince.
It is she who infuses the ginkgo, now I can see it.
It is she who leans down to Jesus’s blossoms,
wherefore they know their limits.
And all of the souls in the ivy
pulse, sending, receiving in code,
listen, tattle, and listen.
It is she who speaks to the toads.
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