It is Difficult to Tell the End from the Beginning, by Charlene Langfur
Posted on April 12, 2019
I have never been insistent on how to order
Stretches of time or patches of narrative. I go with what I’ve got,
as if order always finds its own level as the need requires.
And as the roots of my garden plants survive the worst, living on
long after they appear in need of help. I think people must be the same
as they are. Beginning again like any plant life does, if we take the chance,
and this is why I count the mala beads around my wrist for patience,
so I go on ignoring who doesn’t like me because I am a gay woman,
an egghead who reads essays for a living, and I go on making plans
for a whole new life as if enough years are in front of me to see them through.
I’ve learned plans have alterations within them, wiggle room. I know
what doesn’t hold up today may work out again tomorrow.
And this is how my garden goes on and takes to way of its own
no matter where I plant this or that, small areas of the garden grow wild
and then there is the garden I dream of at night, a made up one, one that takes car
of the neighborhood for the long haul, full of staples, carrots and
onions and calendula replete with the yellow and ripening of it all.
So, I dream more beginning these days than endings of formal conclusions.
Maybe tonight there will be another palm tree at the end of my dream, one of the old
Fat one that has lived in the oasis here forever. My dreams always open
and close with a garden or a tree like the palm. A place maker for what
has to happen for any of us to go forward and see the way ahead or not. Dreaming
what already is. The sweet green leaves blowing in the light wind,
the sound of the brush of one leaf against another one all night long. It is a start
Charlene Langfur is an organic gardener, a southern Californian, a SU Graduate Writing Fellow and her writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, most recently a series of poems in Weber-The Contemporary West and Poetry East. In 2018 poems were included in Gravel, Connecticut Poetry Review, Bluestem, Third Wednesday, California Quarterly, and others.