The evening we went
shopping for perennials, the doors
to the garden section of Home Depot
were closed, and we had to take
the long way inside through the main
double doors, making a left
past the stacked patio chairs, the tiki
torches, the cushions, the chimes
and rubber hoses. And yet, minute
by minute the sky deepened like a sheet
of indigo metal overhead, because of course
that section had no ceiling, no roof.
I thought it strange— the measures taken
toward creating enclosure here,
where each bud and leaf in its pod
of potting medium, each succulent in sand
and straw was no longer a thing
in the wild yet never quite completely
domesticated. On a shelf next to real
and synthetic paving stones, grass seeds
slept in yellow plastic jugs resembling
large pour containers of pancake mix.
We moved from island to island,
choosing among tubs of green: salvia,
lavender, hosta; and finally six
fragrant groups of rosemary. We bore
them home; opened the gate, which
movement turned on the motion sensor
lights. We set them on the deck
within the backyard’s interior, where
under a new moon they waited until they
could be given back to the earth.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.