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Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing with Verse
The Artist The Poet
Sam Coronado Aleida Rodriguez
"Dreaming of Cuba" (detail)
2005
Digital Painting, 20" x 16"
The Poet
Aleida Rodriguez
The Garden
What have you done with the garden
entrusted to you?
—Antonio Machado
1.
When I call home to check my mail,
she tells me the latest word from the world is
No, jagged as a torn envelope. But
she’s been sawing up wooden panels
on which she’ll paint icons of our English setter,
our yellow-nape parrot, our two cats,
each with the neighboring hill as a backdrop,
like medieval landscape. She admits
she suddenly missed me today in the market,
picking out unblemished red potatoes
and pristine ears of corn, missing the way
I check bags, return the gouged and wormy ones
to the bin. “Oh, you only miss me
in supermarkets,” I say. She insists
we’ve turned a corner. When I leave town now,
she confesses, she lives like a teenage boy
for just a couple of days. She loves our simple life:
the way we cook together, talk in bed
late into the night. Apples are falling
from our tree faster than she can eat
or give them away, so she’s blanching
and freezing them for later.
Tomatoes are sacrificing themselves
on the altar of her mayonnaise-laden sandwiches.
Acorn squash fill like bellies,
but sow bugs have become squatters on the peppers.
2.
Late that night, still snared in the sticky net
of sleep, I surface to remember my dreams:
All night I search the plum-dark city
for a coffee shop that will let me
set up my portable Smith-Corona.
“It’s the size and color
of a thick slice of bread,” I offer
in my defense. All night
my sleep is trampled
by tiny black tanks.
I turn on a lamp. Through my reflection
the red geranium blooms out of a hole
in the patio, the asparagus fern launches
another monstrous shoot, the green note
of morning plays the leaves of the ginger,
now that I’ve trimmed back the holly
that was darkening the yard.
Back along the perimeter fence the bougainvillea dangles
bursts of coral at the tips of spider legs, finally,
after eight barren years. Last year
you could not have convinced me
I would fall in love again.
My garden lay abandoned in yellow weeds.
Is this what love is? Bending the will
all winter and spring, pulling at the ground?
Clearing once more the path between fruit trees?
Watering the desert? What faith
moved me to haul out the remains
of the old bench, buy another, sturdier one
to place at the secluded spot
behind the garage wall
where I set up the typewriter
to record the progress and settle in
to see what happens next?
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