Container Gardening
Maya Quirino
Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.
– V. Sackville-West’s Garden Book
In this garden the size of a small stage,
a handful of yellow-bellied sunbirds come
to drink from the heart of a dwarf banana plant
I had some idea would bear fruit.
Perhaps catching a petal of color, a mariposa
scales (past the other tenants’ clotheslines
and nuclear-family laughter) the four storeys
of this building clouded with dust trapped
by rainwater. Arriving, it will hover over the paper
flower whose thorns tear the skin of my preloved dresses.
It stays awhile before crossing next door,
where the dama de noche is about to scent the dark.
Dry and wet spells leave their signature marks:
the leaves of Chinese bamboo curling and then hardening
like cocoon, the tarragon’s sterile flowers fluttering down
all at once—a display room of nature’s commandments.
Tonight, I tell you about Atelopus zeteki vanishing
in the Panamanian rainforest (a sign of cataclysm underway).
Standing dead-center in the garden, one with the shadows
of the greenery, you wait for me to fix you your poison
of choice. You tease me about propagating the blue pea,
an herb for breaking fevers and for holding puja rituals
in India that to you is but a glorified weed.
When I tell you I’m joining a virtual bloom watch
of the Queen of the Night in the US, you fake-pledge
to hunt for one in the nameless jungle where you will sleep
to birdcall, the rush of waterfall, and the face
of a mountain being sculpted into pathways to nowhere.
“Are you going to start making potions now?” you crack.
You have my library of plants in containers to thank
for this lushness one wouldn’t find were a child’s
treasure map made of the village. Here transplanted
is a scene as old as desire:
you’re a hero on a journey,
I become every woman
who has always known
how to heal men’s wounds.
Maya Quirino is a non-profit worker and independent film producer.