From the archives – Painted Garden — Cheryl Snell

Painted Garden

If he had simply faded
like a shout from the street,
the chaste tree
she loves for its blue irony
would not have been planted,
nor the red clover made to bleed.
It was always too dark, or windy,
it was too late to call
or she would have grown blooms enough
to rasp against the drainpipe, she could have
frilled the sills with fringe. The point
is to keep track of it all: the tears and lies,
the number of times skin pinks
under unfamiliar hands. The muscles,
lax enough, will loose inhibitions
into the world. To load a brush with moments,
who doesn’t want that? She wasn’t trying
to mock the sun with night-blooming flowers.
She was trying to capture the foxglove’s broken hearts.

from Autumn Sky Poetry 10 — by Cheryl Snell

Photo by Christine Klocek-Lim