Poets In The Garden

James Cochran

I arise with the fire of July’s sunrise, make my way to top of the hill where I’ve
dug a hole beneath the black cherry’s dark trunk...squat & relieve myself
of yesterday’s burdens, breathe in deeply the oxygen of now, cover the past
with dirt as it should be, wash hands, make coffee, fill finch feeder with thistle
seeds & watch as the first gold sparks arrive in minutes.

You told me to gather my poets around me so I pluck them gently from garden
vines & bushes, Czesaw Milosz, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda...search for Irene
Mckinney, my sensual Appalachian grandmother found in the depths of pandemic
depression in trailhead free box, but she’s nowhere to be found, carried off by jays
perhaps or passed on to a friend. Rumi lurks in moist earth among new potatoes,
reminder of a manic summer when his unabashedly didactic spiritual verse was
the purest fuel for my flaming soul fire. I’m clipping crisp dew laced lettuce leaves
inscribed with the words of Robert Frost, who’s been with me ever since I was a boy.
He wrote the only poem I’ve ever memorized, contained in a dog-eared paperback
nibbled around the edges by distant generations of the same mice who now haunt
my cupboard & flirt with peanut butter traps.

The day wears on & I interpret my way through a crop of other people’s sad stories.
The man who tried to hang himself, but the rope broke, then tried to cut himself
but only bled a lot, the Colombian lesbian asylum seeker raped at gunpoint
by Mexican police in the desert somewhere outside of Reynosa, the father
who loaded his family into the car for a trip to the beach, trunk filled
with meat for the grill, caught in a hail of bullets from narco-traffickers,
wife hit 3 times in the leg but all the rest miraculously unscathed, he says
if it weren’t for the meat in the trunk he wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.

On a stage somewhere, Dwight the old bearded banjo player says he fought
suicide every day for years, hates the songs that entice us to “Dance all night
with a bottle in your hand” & plucks tunes learned deep up a holler on a 19th
century instrument he wanted to learn to play for 50 years until god finally
allowed him to do so. Half a world away I’m driving through the rain in Wales
listening to news of the demise of reproductive rights in Amerika, Roe V Wade
struck down, old white men asserting their dominion over the female body.

When it hurts too much I switch the station to an English gardening show,
they are discussing poor germination of parsnips & parsley & tips for breaking
seed dormancy, defined as an evolutionary adaptation that prevents seeds
from germinating during unsuitable ecological conditions that would typically
lead to a low probability of seedling survival. Above a rocky sheep covered
hillside, ageless photons dance into a double rainbow & clouds of finches
dart from thistle to thistle.

ABOUT THE POET

James Cochran is a proudly Appalachian writer, transplanted from the soil of Southeastern Ohio to the hilly streets of Charleston, West Virginia. He embraces the practice of mindfulness through writing, and writing through mindfulness, and enjoys listening to the neighbor’s wind chimes.   His  work has appeared in Change 7, Poetry Superhighway, West Virginiaville,  and the Anthology "I thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio's  Appalachian Voices. Additional work can be found on his blog Oak Crow  Sings https://creepybabydolls.wordpress.com/