The Danger of Confusing a Flower Box with an Orchestra

The impatiens are drooping in their box
like a pit orchestra taking a final bow.
They wave their flaccid goodbye to summer.
I walk over to take a peek at an empty nest
hidden among the dying pink trumpets,

and I am surprised to find the nest is covered
in a thatch. With worried fingers, as if it were
the drummer's toupee, afraid of what I'll find,
of what I'll leave behind—I lift:

Mama! There in the robin's' nest is a big,
round, green egg. I drop the toupee and run
inside and grab my wife and bring her out
so she can see. "What bird could lay an egg like that?"

"It looks like a lime," she says.
"Or a lacrosse ball." I say.
"Some huge bird. A Great Blue Heron?"
"Is it Mama Robin's third act?"

It's been weeks since Mama Robin's fledglings
flew — all except the one who didn't, whose
tender carcass of sticky feathers my fingers
gently lifted to the garbage can.

"A Brown-Headed Cowbird," says A.I. confidently.
"It checks all the boxes." Except when we ask
to see a photo of a cowbird egg, and then A.I. falls
back on its old standby: it must be a hallucination,

and of course A.I. is right because it wasn't
an egg at all, but a Black Walnut in its green
husk—stashed away for winter by an Eastern
Gray Squirrel. My wife says I told you,

and she will use my words-–"a squirrel is incapable
of carrying such a large nut or of producing
such a thatch"—against me
as our symphony plays.

Flowers

We filled all the planters Saturday. Went to the community garden
where each hothouse purchase supports a person with a disability.

You picked them out. I insisted. Though you had a bad headache.
You asked for my help. I had a headache, too. From the hothouse.

Back home, I opened the door at the bottom of the compost bin.
It opened like a secret trap, and on my knees I reached in and

greedily clawed the black gold out toward me, cupped it, felt it,
cool and moist, the final distillation of so many apple peelings,

asparagus stems, pineapple skins, onions and potatoes left
long in the pantry, all those bags of grass clippings, all that rot,

now perfect. When you came with a bottle of water, you couldn't
find me—I was down on my knees, up to my armpits in compost.

We filled the boxes under the garage windows that you had asked
me to clean as a Mother's Day gift. The spider webs were thick over

them. The casings, and even the panes, were stained with juices
from all of the bugs that had been caught and squirted and eaten.

For years. That's why it was a gift. You couldn't even think about
what had gone on there, all that time. We filled three deck boxes

and two green pots in wrought iron stands and the large planter
that marks the entrance to the bay of the garden I dredged and filled

more than twenty-three years ago, when we first moved in together.
Sunday you told me that you were lonely, and I said I was lonely, too.

And you said I wasn't listening. And I wasn't. I was still thinking about—
wanting to feel again—the compost, so dark and rich it stained my skin.