Poetry / Reilly D. Cox
:: Robert the Gardener ::
My father, always the artist, loses employment
and begins digging holes for a hilly college.
Each morning, he wakes from the same dream:
he’s back in his youth and gliding down the lane
of an endless pool, his long, hairless limbs
moving through the water silently towards a Cracker Jack
salvation, and he wakes. Each morning, he finds
he has sunk into the covers a little deeper, his limbs
a little more tired. He rises as his children are still
in their troubled sleep, brews a pot of coffee,
and pours a river through his magnificent mustache.
He eats three raw eggs, chewing the shells
until they are a fine powder to protect his poor teeth—
holey and golden—and wipes the loose strands of yolk
with a slice of rye bread sporting only a few dark blossoms
of mold. He wraps himself in the emerald-green uniform
with his name embroidered over his heart like a target
and heads into the sun-shy morning. With little fires
burning in his pockets to keep himself warm, he plumes
beautifully—smoke signals trailing behind on his walk
to the Great Garden. He’s given up on disciplining the smoke,
ignores the incessant beacon of O-S-O drifting past his shoulders.
He makes sure to arrive before the other creatures, gathers
hundreds of flowers in his battered cart, rides up
and down the many hills, and only opens his eyes when he senses
a good spot. The college wants to draw in new blood
and my father knows how to arrange color to attract
anything. Sometimes, he grows bored, creates a trompe
l’oeil by a hall, a nature morte by a campus gate, but
he is mostly good, cares for the little blooms,
remembers the lessons his father taught him: sees
that their roots are good and watered, that the sun
won’t hurt them or grow estranged. His coworkers—
younger, cut from nylon—keep themselves entertained
by eating little animals whole. One man claims to have
a family of chipmunks nesting in his belly; another,
a whole pond of goldfish. Each lunch, he tilts
his head back and drops little flakes down the length
of his throat, smiles, says it always tickles
when the fish are feeding. My father sits alone.
He worries that he’s mixed up his eggs, that
he has a brood of chicks begging in his belly,
hatched and angry, so he won’t eat today.
He keeps himself warm with clear liquids,
doesn’t dare to light a match. He imagines
how much warmer it would be, to fall in,
a whole ocean to pickle him into summer.
He knows he’s a good swimmer; he won’t drown.
:: Robert the Gardener (Tent Caterpillars) ::
My father is setting fire to the trees again.
He drags us from our play this way.
My brother and I, split body, jerk awake
at the coughing of a chainsaw in our wood.
We leave our shallow of mud, with so many good
sacrifices buried to the neck, and skulk
towards it. In a clearing, our father has downed
a dozen trees bearded with tent caterpillars
and is lightly shaking a delirious tremens
of gasoline over the many nests. He says,
If you leave anything too long, it grows.
He then takes a rag torch and lets sing
the good water. I had never heard such a choir
before, it was like the sound of marrow.
My brother and I watch our father disappear
in the cracking smoke and barely see
the rag pointing across the crown of trees,
with so many beards waving terribly.
Leaning over, it looks as if the smoke is born
from our father’s beard, and pours angrily
from it. May one day I be so giving. May
one day my beard grow so long
that the holy spirit come flying out.
From the writer
:: Account ::
My grandfather passed away this past August, well over three years since my father passed away. At the time, I had been wanting to write about my grandfather, and the process of dying that was happening so rapidly yet slowly, and all the things that were slipping away as he did, but I was worried that to write about it would make it happen. Then he died, and, starting with a napkin at a restaurant counter, I started putting down everything that was then slipping away.
I imagined my grandfather as something mythic but dwindling—a storied figure who, while once meaningful and revered, had been reduced by time to hearsay and jokes. I started referring to his mythic counterpart as Sargon, after a Mesopotamian emperor who was the child of the royal gardener. I started the process of unmaking by incorrectly referring to him as Sargon the Gardener. In my imagining, Sargon tended to tomatoes in a dilapidated palace outside of Baltimore.
Other members of my family began finding mythic versions of themselves in the poems—the Witching Daughter, the Son’s Widow, the Bloodless Daughter, and the Son’s Ghost. The Son’s Ghost, my father, was always trapped in a process of dying or being dead; he, having died long before my grandfather, in his dying, became Sargon. He is one of the few members of the family to be named in the collection, in part because he was already gone, and in part because he shared a name with others who had passed away and could serve as a greater evocation.
My father was a gardener, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. He had difficulty maintaining jobs and worked, for a time, as a groundskeeper, knowing enough gardening to be qualified for that. While the focus of the Sargon poems were on Sargon, I was being reminded—more and more intensely—of memories of my father and gardening. So though I wrote the first “Robert the Gardener” as a one-off poem to turn the mythic towards the real and to play with un/making, I found myself fixated on more and more memories of my father and plants. Because I tend to be an iterative poet, I began an iterative sequence to find my father again, in all his burning glory.
Reilly D. Cox is a MFA candidate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. They had attended Washington College and the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. They have work available by the Academy of American Poets and by Iron Horse Literary Review.