I put in radishes because they seem in such a hurry.
The garden weeded, free of buttercup, dandelion,
and I tossed out a whole sack of wildflower seeds
I’d hung onto for years, not knowing where to sow.
The birds must have looked the other way, busy
with new-laid eggs, the soil now covered with green stars.
Sometimes nothing happens.
Sometimes we have to shake the ghost globe,
ask the ancestors where they wish to travel today.
In the distance a dog barks. Sometimes my dead
remind me of stars I’d all but forgotten.
There were prisoners who drank poison, some
who threw themselves against the electric wires,
out of windows—they were so afraid of dying
somewhere else. This morning I water strawberry plants
fading in a black planter, worry about people I don’t know
dying in nursing homes, in cages along the border.
What if truth was loud enough, even the deniers heard
and began to believe? This morning I pull a snail
away from beneath the leaves of the bay plant, uncover
a tree frog beneath a pot of soil, and nothing growing in it.
The snail was beautiful. The frog was hesitant
to leave the bowl of my glove for the unknown territory
of a tulip leaf.
It’s what I’ll never know
sometimes saves me.
