I. Garden
Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
out of his side.
—W. B. Yeats
Sitting in a garden, unsheltered from the moon’s
ongoing description of the sun. A coyote walks up to a
flowering pear and sticks her head in. Hibiscus spends
at least part of the night describing the moon.
If heaven will one day arrive on earth, as Joseph
Smith said, will it appear as a grid? If women don’t
speak to God in heaven, what will they say when it
falls to earth like a curtain? You float past me above
the leaf duff, “clean” like a ghost, “clean” like a
difficult vessel.
The garden tells its lie of isolation: “nature has died
and the garden is its memory.” A blanket of cool
irrigation settles in the corners of each leaf. Ghosts
and rabbits, horned lizards, carpenter ants organize
their respective diplomatic anarchism. I take a
different path, almost running— disturbed by all the
roses facing forward, as if I’d set them out myself.
When we were younger, I complained I had no sisters.
You, taller and prettier, turned your dark hair around
a finger. In a silly voice, you said: remember, I’m your
sister.
Older, I forgot. I, forgetter.
Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, forthcoming), and the chapbooks 'House' (Ghost Proposal, 2020) and 'Perfumer's Organ' (above/ground press, 2023). Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Clarence Snow Memorial fellow and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.