Tagetes patula (French Marigold)

Tagetes patula (French Marigold)

Though I remain famous for not growing things
and implied to my husband that it might be filial
of him to plant my mother's garden, I was the one
to core out neat holes, trowel in compost

speckled with eggshell still,
to water each waiting womb-nest
before patting in seedlings: tomatoes,
peppers, spinach, thyme, zucchini we' d mistaken

for cucumbers, milkweed, lantana, marigolds.
I caged as instructed and watered again, while my mother
who is not so good at just sitting and wants to do
what her back and knees and wrists will still permit,

raked and clipped from her stool, keeping me company.
The symmetrical lines of young plants
in bare sandy soil were pleasingly tidy, I thought
I might be understanding the satisfaction

of such labor on a sunny, cool Sunday in spring,
but then it was time to mulch, which in my mother's garden
is done with leaves that wintered and dried on the lawn
and when they run out, sodden leaves from the big black bin

yielding an amorphous, heavy gradient
between leaves and compost and earth
transforming the proud precision of my rows into
a funny, unruly mess like an unmade bed.

Reluctantly I tucked shaggy decomposed leaves
around marigolds, their sharp terpene scent
a limbic trigger: our grandmother's garden
where I first learned the smell of compost

where when I was five or six or seven
I once somersaulted in my bathing suit
right onto a bee which stung me in the middle
of my back, piercing me permanently

with existential outrage at the treachery
of the body, pain's unexpectable certainty.
I'm thinking now of the hissing and beeping
of square, airless hospital rooms

as my cousin sits with her mother's
ferocious thirst, with the difficulty of waiting
for tubes, medicines, and procedures
while I hang tools and gloves in the shed.

Thirty years ago, nursing our first-born,
I declared to my husband, "I don't believe in Mother's Day."
Do you mean you don't observe, he asked,
or you don't believe it exists? Charmed,

I chose the latter option. I christened it
my Reverse Tinkerbell Theory of Social Change
and set about disbelieving things I don't approve of
out of existence, with not much success to date.

I haven't been able to get the whole audience
to refuse to clap for war, or fossil fuels,
or industrial-scale agriculture with its toxins
and concentrated animal feeding operations,

but I've learned from my mother
to do what my wrists and knees and back will let me do,
and, thankfully, that it's karmically permissible
to complain about the state of being incarnate

and if like all mothers I thirst for justice and relief,
and if like all mothers sometimes I don't know
what I'm doing or what I can do, or
whether it's time to mother or be mothered,

at least I can follow what instruction I get
for this nourishing, complicated tending.
I'll nestle these seedlings in, string lines and cages
for them to climb up towards the sun,

then obediently bless the naked beige soil
with a layer of last year's leavings
to keep the weeds from growing
and keep the moisture in.