Memory of the Garden

Where the creek-scarped ravine (lately buried
to the lay the bed of the hospital road)
once swelled with the quick-pulsed electric songs
of cicadas and locusts, one now hears
only the dull thrum and scrape of traffic,
—where whispers of leaves once enshrouded us,
their bright, green dimension like a pocket,
a universe into which we slipped, light-
ly, as if through some enchanted portal:
the long wardrobe of summer afternoons.
—where an aspen grove slaked its feeble thirst
near the creek’s moat, where we found castle walls
crenellated in a mound of old tires
and stacked the frost-cracked rings in wobbling lines,
turned, and toppled them with a hail of stones.
—where we shot aluminum cans, rang and
filled their hollow bodies with copper balls
the day you startled the owl, which bristled
and hissed from its nest, hidden in the brush—
when, half-sick, I begged you not to shoot.
      I shoot magpies in the garden, you said.
      But I’d never carried death like the road
      where sirens shriek above this memory,
      never known it, and I balked like Adam |
      to take my first small and irrevocable taste.

(Flint Hills Review, 2018)