The Garden of Verse: The Great Egret Knows Who He is... The Poet Recalls How He Began

 

My photo of the Great Egret, who courteously posed for his picture

in an inlet off Boston Harbor, near Quincy's Wollaston Beach. The poem

responding to the photo appeared in the June issue of Verse-Virtual.org.

Here it is:

Great Egret

The name is no exaggeration 
A creature made of formal beauty
A head shaped like a woodcutter's wedge
            its plane horizontal, no top to its bottom 
The angle down the back more shapely
            than the angle down the front 
Its stance an unearthly walk upon the water,
its twin, a staged imitation –
            almost perfect, 
but upon inspection
possibly a little better 
Its color either white, all colors merged into one,
     or a single offering of light on water, 
the color of shimmer
 
Built for the job, or something grander
Shining like an idea in the eye of god

The June issue also includes a poem about some of my earliest

childhood 

memories. We lived with my grandmother (my mother's 

mother) in Flushing, Queens, NYC. The poem reports the 

little disturbances of childhood just as I recall them. 

Growing Pains

I am growing
Ever so small at the beginning of things,
yet I am growing
Kissena Park, Flushing, Queens, walking home 
     with Dad
who takes me, after work, to the playground
Freed of my daylong presence, Mom takes a pass 
After play time, the swings, perhaps monkey bars, 
I am enjoying the freedom of the warm evening 
     on the walk home 
when I slip, attempting some show-off gesture
a touch beyond my childish confidence
and fall, cutting my knee on something sharper 
     than mere earth,
my first wounding, by something harder 
     than mere flesh, 
though at so long a remove I will never recall 
     what dare I was taking, 
what test of my agility 
that resulted in a stumble.
“I told you not to do that!” Dad scolds
“Glass,” he reports to Mom. “I told him to watch out 
     for broken glass on the ground.”
“Not too bad,” she replies, seemingly unworried,
a pattern that repeats in my future stumbles,
which grow in severity as years advance
Glass, I think later: a reason for bleeding 
Everybody needs a reason for bleeding 
 
I do not feel the wound, at least not in memory,
but the disappointment
of failing to complete that little playful leap,
that stretching of my childish wings
 
2.
We live in Grandma’s house, the old brownstone
on a numbered street 
where the buses go by at night, every night 
in the summer dark, and I am exiled 
     from the company of humans
to dwell among the shadows 
     of the darkened bedroom 
above the night-clad street.
I hear the muttered exhalations, 
the squeeze of brakes, opening of doors
Upstairs in the big old house we left behind, 
     so memory insists, 
when I was only three –
Is this arrow from the past my first memory?
The wound in the park – 
Or, from that same-shadowed epoch, a cry 
     for my mother 
in fear of the shadows from the street playing
     on the wall opposite my child’s-bed –
“There are men in my room!” I insist, “Big men!”
“No one’s in your room,” Mom concludes, 
     using my full first name 
in token of her authority, 
after a skeptical examination 
     of the flicker-show.
“It’s only shadows.”
 
Shadows and cutting glass. Does she leave the door 
     ajar?
Downstairs the adults question, and her replies 
     betray an air of qualification  
replacing the reassurance offered 
to the bed-bound child. 
 
Early indications, I take it, that I am on my own.
The big people are at hand. They care for me,
but cannot be relied on for everything. 
No Odysseus, but I bear the scar. 

The Garden of the Seasons: The Garden Springs to Life in May

 

The Clematis vine climbs up our front porch. It blooms from around the third week of May through the month of June. We live Quincy, a small city that borders Boston, Mass.

Here's a poem inspired by our Clematis plant:

ClematisLooking Down at Us*

 

Like fallen stars

but oversized

great violet wheels descending on tame, unwary

    villages below

those little folk of summer

 

Wagging fat limbs, like octopi

bred on a diet of purple sun

Creatures from a universe of stronger light

     and the appetite of clouds

 

their slow motion tumble

the stopwatch of spring

 

*It was published by Turtle Island quarterly, back in February.

Blue Forget-Me-Not blooms under a Weeping Cherry tree. The white-blooming groundcover is Sweet Woodruff.

 

 

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, New Verse News, Unlikely Stories, and others. His poetry chapbook "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award, and hHe was named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award. A book of linked short stories, titled "House Stories," has been accepted for publication by Adelaide Press.

Bleeding Heart blooms in April.

 

The tree-form of Peony, also known as the Chinese Peony, blooms early in May. Unlike the more common Peony, the stems are wood and do not wilt or die back in winter. And its blossoms are large.

I wrote this back in 2013:

With blossoms big as your hand, the “tree peony” was voted the “unofficial national flower” of China following a nationwide vote in the nineties. In Chinese culture, red is the color of good luck.

            The tree peony grows taller and has more of a classic branching-out tree shape than the more common peony shrub. It has a woody trunk and branches like a tree, and you don’t trim the woody parts back

            And it seems to bloom earlier. I was surprised the first time it bloomed early in May. Last year it bloomed in April. This year, a cooler, slower spring, the flowers first showed on May 11.

            It’s hard not to stare at the blossoms if you’re nearby. They’re the neon signs in the Times Square of springtime’s Nature City.  

Eight years later, I'm still amazed by the blossoms every year.

The flowers pictured, from above, are an Icelandic Poppy (orange); a Korean lilac, very pale flowers, looking white in this photo; roses blooming over a Rhododendron; and Siberian Iris, that begin opening in late May.