Today in the cemetery it is warm, sixty-six degrees in the sun. All of my apprehension toward the manifestation of spring dissipates in the balmy, bright sun. In just five minutes I have seen more people in the cemetery today than I have all winter, seven. It is nice to have some “human” company in this place, company outside of the frozen shells underground.
There is an older gentleman working in a flowerbed maybe fifty feet away from me. I am not sure what kind of work you can do in a flower bed in the middle of March? But then again, I am wearing a pair of shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt in the middle of March, so who am I to judge? It’s funny how the warmth of today (or the first noticeable changes we see in any situation) leads us to great acts of over-anticipation.
The male gardener is on his knees, trading the blue of his jeans for the pale color of worn denim. With his hands he moves stoned blocks into attractive and consistent curves and bends, making an arena for the jungles of April. I start to think about the “institution” of flowerbeds. This is going to sound presumptuous (and please know that I do admire a well crafted flowerbed), but aren’t flowerbeds a conceited things? Ultimately they are (even if in a small and “harmless way) an act of human command over nature. Flowerbeds are realistic manifestations/actions of control and preference. They are another opportunity for us to decide what in nature works best together, where, and how they should be arraigned/contained.
As I am watching the gardener, and all of these thoughts of “human oppression” are flooding my brain I am aware that I may be taking this a little too far. I pinch myself, and any sense of anger or tension towards flowerbeds quickly leaves me. But I am still intrigued by the cultivation, design, and materialization of “natural” flowers that are “managed” in these manmade flowerbeds.
Specifically, I am engaged by this man, the old gardener working with his hands on this flowerbed in the cemetery. I wonder how many late winters and early springs he has done this (garden)? And even more specifically, how many years he has tended this flowerbed? I like to think that he has lived with this flowerbed since his twenties, since he was a young man, since he was my age. Did he sit in the cemetery in the early warmth of March and smile at the promise that this plot had? Did he find a new promise in the dirt every spring? Like a poem, the beautiful thing about a flowerbed is that it is always open to revision if you are willing to stick with it. With every April the gardener has the chance to tweak, develop, and color the flowerbed.
I have become endeared to this man. I have been starring at him for quite some time now. Sitting back on his heels he uses his forearm to wipe off his brow. He turns and looks back at me (still starring and wielding a pen and journal). I hesitate, feeling like I just got caught with my hand in the cookie jar. I make an awkward gripping face with my lips and jitter my right hand in a waving motion toward him. It is too late for him to see, he turned back to his work. That’s okay though, I still feel like a bond has been formed between us; the poet and the gardener, the artists of the cemetery.
We have quite a long history of liking our nature orderly and manicured (the American lawn is a great example). After the semester of your solitary experiences in the cemetery, it's so interesting to see other evidence of human activity.
ReplyDeleteYou've been evoking some fascinating senses of the tension between the orderly and the unconquerable aspects of the cemetery, whether its the presence of death, the rains, the orderliness of the gravestones, and now the presence of the gardener and the manufactured appearance of a flowerbed. There is an odd shared sense of creation the two of you share, brought out by the desolate connotations of the cemetery. Your setting is certainly full of possibility, and the dynamics you're showing us are deeper and more complex than I originally realized a cemetery could hold. Excellent choice, and excellent observations. Huzzah.
ReplyDeleteI like that your emotions at the beginning were different in the end, after almost meditating on this gardener. While I am cynical, and I do believe gardens do promote that aspect of controlling nature, I'd like to believe that a lot of people garden because that is one of their few experiences in nature, with nature. As a result, they meditate and appreciate during this. If nothing else, think of the gardeners who experience firsthand the detriments nature can bring: pests, rodents, both causing an overall destruction of nature. In this way, the gardener is enlightened to the fact that he/she cannot control nature. This can also be a learning experience for the gardener, bringing him/her closer to nature.
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