GARDEN OF ASPHALT

billboards
peeling tongues

what cheer
deep river

old crops burnt
soil sleeping green

clouds imitate
tree shapes
darkly

steady sixty five
shrinks to dust
      to dusk
      to open spaces

____

GARDEN OF BALCONIES

familiar threat
and dawn
despite a name

night's apostrophe
punctuated

rectangular light
ironed
strips of evening

rooted geranium
fighting erosion

____

My series of garden poems have a very specific source: A dream. But not just any dream—a gift of symbols. In it, I strolled on a gravel path through a Edwardian zoological garden filled with collected specimens of demons. Each ornate cage was graced with an elegant label bearing a Latin and common name, and each demon was an extravagantly colored creature with strange fins, wings, and antennae. The cages were closed but not locked, and, in the dream, I considered how easily one might let a demon loose just by playing with the temptingly delicate hinges of its cage. Upon waking, I wrote the first poem of the series, Garden of Demons. Soon, I began imagining other unusual gardens that would make interesting attractions for my curious but distanced Edwardian doppelganger, and those turned into poems, too.