Posts tagged Gardening

Poem: Tree-Hugger

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Dominique Larntz * October 31, 2012

 

I read in a book my mother gave me
that school children in China
learn to plant trees.

The oldest trees are Redwoods
in or near California,
whose smells and crackles
embolden my memories.

I’d like to be buried in those odors.

So far I’ve only learned to plant things
in containers

and I learned it on my own.

I couldn’t go around flinging seeds
just anywhere in this desert,
on this concrete,
in my enthusiasm,
in my greed for growth.

Surely the ground is too bricked,
despite the refrain of moss
and grafting that repeats
in my mind.

What if I had
a reference,
a reverence
from the structures
of my world
so that I had no need
to wait

to meet someone
from China to ask
if they really learned
to plant a tree
when they were young?

Poem: A New Habit

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Dominique Larntz * September 2, 2012

 

A New Habit

I think I did it first:
he asked me if I liked the shelf he finished

And in my mind I said,
are you kidding, it’s fantastic!

In my heart, I sang of the way a shelf
we carve into our lives to set a book upon
was made from a tree that reached as deeply into the dirt
as its branches stretched toward the sun.

He asked me again, a little perturbed this time.

“Do you like the new shelf?”

I shook myself and said aloud, “Yes, yes. I love it.”

I noticed this new habit we have—
assuming we have heard the other respond.

When we were younger and first in love,
we spoke together fast and secretly—so fast
that we would finish the others’ sentence
before listening and laughing in the joy of it.

Now our love life is ecstatic with age
and I can report back in time
that there is nothing more beautiful
than love well lived.

The love well lived requires both sides
to mature, both sides sometimes to be wrong,
a song of sacrifice lived behind the curtain
of deep desires to do something different than
is being done—requires abandoning the place of want
and its unending possibilities—those are ceded
with wonder and awe for the roots and depth
where we have best blossomed instead,
like two bookends slid securely into place
holding up stories on a shelf that will last for a while.

For twenty years, we have said and not said
so many wonderful things to each other; it seems
like sunshine to be around him.

Our relationship sustains this living landscape
and our daily lives are finally slow enough to feel it.

The other day, I asked him a question—
I can’t even remember what it was—
and he didn’t answer,
so I answered yes for him.

When you ask your next question,
only to wait and wait for its answer,
perhaps your spouse or child
or aging parent or God
is so ecstatic with you
they have this sense
you have already heard.

Poem: Deep Listening

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Dominique Larntz * May 7, 2012

Deep Listening

My desire to grow tomatoes is so deep
that I wonder if they desire me too,
if the tomato seed dozes and views
the arising images of a farmer placing her
gently into the soil, and how the tomato seed
experiences love in its swaddled dark
arid bed just after it is tucked into
the dampened dirt and dolomite
so that it feels safe to respond to the sunlight
in the days that follow.

The dormancy of the seed,
the dormancy of that desire
and its potential that will build
from a rigid tiny thing you could have dropped
from your fingers before it was ever planted
into the fragrant desert blossom that will feed
and fulfill the entire lush autumn season
reminds me that spring is anytime
you can find the environment
to feed it.

Poem: Mass Commercialization Disperses Back Into Family Gardening

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Dominique Larntz * January 12, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”

Mass Commercialization Disperses Back Into Family Gardening

My counter,
the smallest
of laboratories,
is the perfect example
of high entropy,
crowded again
with oats and cranberries;
vodka sauce and figs.
Or is it the smallest?
From two hundred years past,
tell me the science fiction writer
who would have imagined
the double-ovened joyous
holiday we have any day
while watching a big screen TV
in the great room and washing
tomatoes grown organically
from containers on our back porch
because the mass shipped
tomatoes have no taste.
I try organizing the cupboard
fairly well, watching for signs
of perfectionism
or hoarding in my psyche,
noting how they can
relate like two opposite points on a line
or two points that meet on a circle
when that line is shaped
to be curved beyond a bowl.
Naming myself on that continuum
likely fails to add flavor
to any dish produced in this lab.
Better to place my attention
on more physical details–the smell
of lemon as it cleans the disposal,
the richness of the blossoming
orchid on the shelf, the feel of the jar
of chipotle as I twist the cap open
to add it to our eggs in the morning.
Chaos like ours, like mine,
exists well beyond–and well within–
the projects and recipes and tools and tastes
at my fingertips.

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