LUCY DOUGAN

Notes Toward an Impromptu Garden

(i)
You love this don't you,
like me? The rain beaded
on your eyelashes as you pass.

Nothing else disclosed
between strangers,
only this -
I had to have
black nails, full, pushed up from my skin.

(ii)
Down the side of the house
in unlikely soil
there's an impromptu garden
and all my attempts to move its show
have failed.

I turn and leave the tenderest
pertunias to it,
and then, delighted,
wonder if our souls become perennial
from sheer neglect.

(iii)
The first sign of you today:
a perfect cosmos flowering
from a trodden stem,
and as I cupped its pollen-dusted world,
close to the ground,
the dearest intimation of your life
comes down with the evening.