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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

quite contrary

Oh you and your well-tended garden. The flowers that bloom and fade and bloom again, perennials and annuals though you can never remember which is which, the giant tulip bulbs you unearth in the winter and push back under the willing dirt in the spring, don't you know that it's rude to keep your tulips waiting when they're in the mood. Ahem. The bushes laden with sweet berries that you kneel beside, plunging your hands in over and over until your arms are stained with blood from the thorns and berry juice from your over-eager fingers. The sweet soft grass you can lie back on, nap in a sunbeam. Mysteries of ivy and your trellised longing, roses with unusual names and the richest scent, you cut them down in bunches and fill the house with their inverted death. And in the winter, even in the darkest month, the hum underground while the snow covers every surface into anonymity. Gardens are like this, they burst forth and fade in sequence and you love this flow, the pull. 

In the corner there is a deep hole, the one place where you plant nothing and nothing grows. At some point you had plans even for this space, a tree that would provide blossoms in the spring, fruit and shade in the summer, a place for a child to climb, the stark beauty of snow on bare branches, the one thing in the garden that would never disappear. You dug the ground carefully, dirt caked in your broken nails, worms rolling away from your fingers. The first tree you planted too deep and narrow, and the roots never spread, you dug it up and planted it again but it was too late already. The next tree, too, though the reasons were unclear, you did everything right and it wasn't enough and when you had to pull it out the root system ripped through the rest of the garden to such an extent you thought it might never recover. And another tree, and another. You rolled a rock into the space and gave up on the idea of trees, and the rock was a good place to sit and read a book, rest your back against it in the summer and feel the heat radiate from it. Over winters, though, the rock cracked and eventually even that had to be removed as a hazard. 
 
And so now you have the hole again, waiting for you to step in and twist your ankle, you hear the emptiness of it calling to you across the garden. What to do. The soil has been so salted with your tears that nothing can grow there, you know this, and even thinking about trying to find another rock makes you almost sleepy. You pile some smaller broken rocks around it, pottery shards, high enough to protect you from falling in, a little wall of warning, and turn your back on it to look at the parts of the garden you love. It's unfortunate but then every garden has a fallow area, so.
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