How Do You Make A Garden Like This?

The breeze block house is one wall.

The fence between garden and driveway, 

thrown over with honeysuckle, white clematis, 

and hedged by a “shelter” of various 

standing plants - 

geranium, rose, and boxelder - 

is another wall, 

that curves 

becoming two.

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Tea with sugar on the low cane chair.

There’s a bird on the roof of 31 E, a sparrow,

blackened by the westerly sun. 

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One of the roses

going up like a beanstalk,

thickened with longing.

Pimpled with spikes: Touch me not. 

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You call these Canterbury Bells.

South Canterbury Bells.

Last time, Evie crushed a sand dollar 

in her pudgy hand.

Later naming one of her Barbies, Sand Dollar.

I tried to find a replacement 

at Caroline Bay 

where the sky was immense 

and the clouds streaked across it 

like the rebel starfleet 

amassing for war.

We found a driftwood shelter,

a sort of chapel of bones, 

a whited sepulchre,

abandoned and deserted 

like the coffins of these churches 

becoming bars and grills.

*

We leave. I leave. 

The garden is showered by a southerly rain.