Letters from the Outside #3

"Even the prick of the thistle,

queen of the weeds, revives

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt

there is a leaf to cure it."

Evening cloudburst. Rain on the oak leaves a white noise that ushers us through to morning sunlight.

Decidedly cooler, time for second seeding.

Hung out with the tomato plants this morning, cut away the spotty yellow stems, noticed the different kinds of flowers and the different ways they smelled when you rubbed a leaf between your fingers. I like when the poodles are here, chewing oat straw shoots and on hot bright days stretched out contented in the shade between the plants. Theyre dense presences, the tomatoes, fruit profuse, huge. Little nasturtium volunteers tangerine petals and blood orange veins. My peacevine cherries with the structure I love in both fruit and flora. Blessed in that the summit of my present expectations is for these to eat.

Bees with their bright pollen panniers in the sunflowers strange year for sunflowers. Ive got a phalanx of runts with their petals already spent and giants their heads still a fist. I have multifloras a few inches high and a foot wide. My Velvet Queens rule, robed in coal feathers, black hearts, petals the color of dry blood.

The cool carries over into today, I went out in sun but returned in rain, infinitely gentle rain you hear in the trees before you feel on your skin and comes and goes like sunlight shifting before and after cloud.

An hour later its late july, the air thick through the screen and smelling of heat.

Cempoalxochitl with a little Moonlight scattered through im thinking planted on the outer edges of the garden, my aztec marigolds five feet high dedicated to The Beloved Dead. Unlikely to selfseed, they require the ceremony of sowing every spring, and the smaller white flowers growing between and beneath like light on the water. I fiddled with the strawberries, broad-leaved mothers begetting with long arms the little bundle of wisdom clutched gently at the ends. I marvel at the engineering of a sunflower. The eyelash daggers swivel open like an aperture, bending back to buttress the huge bloom that frames a bank of futures set down in Golden Ratios for the jays to pluck at in november. 

The perennial borders are evolving, but there are trampled patches where the dogs have taken to lie in the hot afternoons and they are proving difficult to dissuade. unwilling to succumb to something invasive and twee, ill settle some volunteers in and checkpoint charlie the nursery this this time next year. The bleeding heart dog bed may receive the same treatment. And this fall, a rhododendron similarly barricaded to keep the big boy four-leg from killing it again. Overcome with The Tide, reduced to lying on the rise on the indian blanket I picked from the left-behind pile at a Dave concert and I realize im attempting to heal myself with the Sun.

August. Undulating waves of sunflowers and corn against the still green hills gentle sloping a magickal setting for the jewel of water that changes its color with the mood of the sky. A shift in the quality of light, already the suggestion of grapevine and cider. The energy isnt succulent, like Spring, or

ascendant like summer. The energy is sugar and yeast that sweetens and preserves. The root sends its all to the fruit. The fruit is fermented.  The almost imperceptible declension into September.

Homeward driving Dark Star '73 brownies and lemonade the sky changes its mind theres another little oak sprout down in front I show T. he can make microwave popcorn with a brown paper bag.

Dirt roads through a lost kingdom in the valley and on the hill horsehead clouds dogmint the sweet milk smell of thistle. The ash tree we were taking apart by the face cord, the first treestand I stood in wreathed in wild grapevine, the Faerie Fort, Cherry Hill, the cow byre and butterflies. Left one mitten on the hill where the elecampane grew, fireflies thick in the ditches along the road to The Big House. We should have brought a turkey feather and a donut, past the pasture The Black Horse lives in, and the house we fled to leaving the farm. Theyve painted over the red trimming and hung macrame spiral seashell windcatchers off the open porch roof and it shifted some weight off the cowboys shoulders.

After a few days thought and doodling i decide 

Spring is Integration, Summer is Convergence, Autumn is Sacrifice, Winter is Contraction.