I say I love being close to you with a story about
a poet’s green thumb.
You breathe in the leaves
and feel your fingers furl/unfurl the edges of a book
I’ve put in your lap, a long line of words rigged
to make some sense of wonder, the pages laid out
like a clearing, woodland bound and tilled, contained
by the niches and corners of a garden the words
will take you to, grandiloquent perhaps and vast
as I remember poetry in a landscape that once moved
me, its epics and ballads, mythic or meandering,
bits of sagas and longing narratives, all so green
as green suggests the early budding of spring, new
shoots and phrasings, first attempts at training a poem
on a trellis when winter leaves and withers away
from the boreal windows, an alphabet of violets
and colt’s foot at the banks, stark before the ferns begin
to write their names for spring, the summer hits
to come, hot and meaningful and meant for basking
among the leaves, skirting blossoms in their beds
that keep changing day to day, hurtling into space
on satellite seed pods, eyes propped on stems and stalks
blinking back the myriad crystal fractals of the sun
burning not too far from here, but farther soon
as autumn collects the final drafts the wind once swept
away, the dead ends and detritus, silvered, grayed
and gone from green to silent now with a heaviness
of shoulders past, the conifers somber and recalcitrant,
uninviting scars and blemishes wounded on wood-bound
feet, bare, gnarled, rooted to the page with no place else
to go, waiting for the solstice to blanket the mountain tops,
the woodpile stacked and ordered like a manuscript
to ease the long, indecent winter ahead, warm some
better function of the heart, and help you picture
how close green gets to green with just these words.
“Green” was a finalist in the 2022 Accenti Poetry Contest.
Antony Di Nardo is the author of seven collections of poetry. His poetry has won several awards, including the inaugural Don Gutterson Award and Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize. His latest collection, Forget-Sadness-Grass, was published by Ronsdale Press (2022). He was born in Montreal.
