A matching pair of garden poems

The Winter in the Garden

The overgrown flowering vines

so recently covered in brilliant

yellow and orange and red and white,

now stand ghostly withered,

 dead in their brown winter clothes.

I sit, in my heavy thrift store long black wool coat.

Coffee and sunshine fighting off the worst of it.

Dark green paint on the iron of the gate

and pocked and dirty white bench.

The neighbor’s cat sleeps on the other bench,

all else is covered by a melting frost,

“all other ground is sinking sand”.

In my Garden in Venice

In my mind, I live in a garden,

off one of the main canals in Venice,

it is poorly maintained,

as I am old and sick, and truth be told,

a bit lazy, and too poor to hire a gardener.

They came, and pushed over the old sprawling

dilapidated mansion, two stories of falling down-ness,

they smoothed over the garden,

plowing under the brick walls,

the gate, the old iron benches,

but in my mind, in a small old house

on the outskirts of Tallahassee,

my garden and the old mansion

still stand, shabby, but secure,

no developer can ever push them over there.

I have a sovereign deed signed

by the king of this place that

I live inside my head.

I will drink coffee here,

probably still, after I am dead.