The Weeds (Accidentally on Purpose)

I watched the first weeds burgeon and decided this was the summer

I wouldn’t stop them, every inch of crabgrass, every foot higher

the woody stem of nightshade, the rogue lily of the valley bells that slyly

migrate, and the hardwood scraggle of spruce, a bluegreen that somehow

found seed in our hospital-cornered flowerbed. God I was so tired of all that

order, of the clattering of stacking trays, of all that black mulch spread

between the lilies for which the deer came in the dead of night to devour

anyway. Who was I keeping things so prim for—just, after all, myself

... and maybe the neighbor’s sense of me which was also for myself—the

work of nursemaiding, ministering to each rock-lined border somewhat

satisfying until a week of lavish rain, of tangled-sheet dreams, the same

slogging offer of harvested reprobate grass was presented on my plate. No

appetite. Would rather go hungry than reheat such arduous leftovers. The

irises and milkweed soaring regardless, even as the neighbor’s forsythia

twined its way into all of their aspirational bedrock beneath the visible face

of the earth, its secret sickness, its slick nightsweat. So what, I countered,

some things are doing just fine coordinating with their ruin. What’s the

worst that happens—after all weren’t the neighbors even more uncaring

toward their landscape, refusing to prune back the tree whose branches

made moss on our gable shingles, the same tree whose trunk is full of

paper wasps, of carpenter bees? And further afield stronger substantiation:

the town taking to mow the yards of vacant houses? I mean fuck it.

When faced with all that overgrowth, doesn’t some large part of you want to

watch it manifest more, just a little bit, to see how wild things really

can get, how close to wreck we can let ourselves step without gripping the

back of each other’s shirts and ripping the body from the very edge, if we

can see it, see how deep the weeds might sow their roots before we can no

longer resist choking their arrogant necks and pulling them up into us?

Knot at our bellies. All that hair cuffed in your fist from the seedling grass

now grown in, a little nest of immaturity between the stones, all that

vinyl root ripping up the surface of the ground, threatening to take the

gentle stems of the morning glories with it when it goes. Maybe

we should let it? If it’s true there’s no longer room for weakness in this

world, and isn’t that how we’ve come to see fragility? There’s no scheduled

operation, no overbooked surgeon, nothing to cut neatly away from what’s

already been taken, what already has taken over, nothing to shape or

mulch down just a commingling of fluids in this wild bed where

everything comes to exist synchronically, roots wrapping roots

regardless of origin, of belonging to, wringing the water of themselves

out bit by bit. A healthy sacrifice under the right circumstances. And if I

want that, if I’d hoped for something less reactive and more Darwinian,

a low-stakes opening where I refuse to intervene, to let the strongest of us

triumph, to rewild my own urges in the confines of our rust-fenced yard

where the tiger swallowtails return to the hairy green perches of the rough

leaves of purple coneflower that lie open and arched against the afternoon

light, resting wings pressed together upon their lance-shaped faces, there’s

opportunity, if I can get myself to see it that way, to let myself feel what it’s

like to let anticipations go, to learn to revel in what might seem more like

mess but could just be learning, to accept what I can make by refusing to

act, or rather by acting out the very point of refusal, holding my arms at my

side, while the grackles plod in the yard pulling up blowfly larvae, how

maybe they might love me indirectly for such inaction, how that could be

the good in this, seeing how they begin to arrive in flock and stay long like

the swallowtail, plucking over the electric sheet of grass in need of a good

cut (nope!), how they hop into the wild of the weedy garden and wet their

silver legs on its dew, probe what’s buried in the cores of the hostas, whose

shady cups maybe they drink from though most likely not, it’s too

romantic and they’re not here for romance, nor are we, its time-consuming

preparations, but more some form of beauty we already well recognize, the

flashing heart which comes only by unproven exercise. Probably, too,

for the feel of the air upon their wings once they emerge from my snarled

labyrinthian green on green, to slowly catch chill when airborne they flee,

goose-pimpled, awakened as any grackle could be, as any one of us could be,

that way, if we so wanted, belly full, if we let ourselves free.