Garden

I walked in the romantic garden and I walked 
in the garden of ruin. I walked in the green-skinned, 
black-skinned garden of Osiris who was ripped to pieces 
and reformed and adored. I walked in that wet, 
incestuous plot. Am I the only one who reads 
for innocence? I walked in the garden of Amadou Diallo 
whose shadow was punctured by unnumbered shafts 
of light leading from West Africa to America where wallets 
are guns. The chirp you heard in the garden as of two black 
holes merging is what we called the soul. And when we cup 
our hands to drink at his fountain we make the shape 
of his skull. Am I the only one who reads for thirst? 
I walked in the gardens of Houston where lizards 
took their colors at the borders between terror and wonder, 
dread and leafy glade, between silence and Sinatra. 
I walked in Pope's garden in Twickenham that rhymed 
wilderness and picturesque, walled in and out the stunted 
self. In the garden of ruin new growth from the palms 
I read as artful, neutral. In the romantic garden the fascists 
sing "I love you, I love you not." Statues in the gardens 
are wrapped in Mylar blankets and blue plastic tarps 
like refugees. I read them for reflection. I read for nation. 
I read for color and form. In the orangery of Guantanamo, 
in the grapevine of Babylon, I'm lost. I went there for the buzz, 
the fiction of silence and a better self. Dressed sentimentally 
in a dynamite suit in the garden of dates and pomegranates, 
I read for patterns of the blast.