And I'll read one more from the series
of plots in my ongoing conversations
about gardening with my neighbors.
This is what happened one afternoon.
Beds (clay).
We are on our knees.
We are saying that the tulips have had it hard this week.
We are saying something about the brightness and the dryness,
and we're saying we hope it will change.
I press a finger into the loam, flick the dust on my jeans.
We are listening to the snip of shears.
I pick up a smooth small disk of pink Sioux quartz,
hold it like an avian heart in the palm.
It is a disk slipped and beating from a time
when all of North America was under sea.
My finger walks the buttery vein that parses the stone in two
and then in four.
Its edges are under siege, its end at the foot
of suburban perennials.
Do you have stones?
Someone is asking me do you have stones where you are from.
Do you have stones like these?
We have purple sunbirds I'm saying.
And their hearts have four rooms, one for every answer
to questions like these.