Full Sun

A poem about life, and love, and never knowing what the hell we're doing.

Photo by Kampus Production

We met in the hardware store,
where I stood holding two packets of seeds,
larkspur and bachelor’s buttons,
and you said those will need full sun, you know,
and I said I have a south-facing yard,
though I did not,
I owned only a fire escape
crowded with terracotta pots and rust.

You bought me coffee from the cart outside.
We sat on a bench damp from overnight.
You told me your grandmother kept a garden
where roses grew so thick against the fence
they pushed the slats apart,
year after year,
until the neighbor’s dog
stuck its nose right through,
and I told you I killed every
houseplant I’d ever owned.
You laughed
and said we’ll fix that.

April.
The maples along the street
put out their first small fists of green.
Your apartment faced an alley,
but the light came creeping through
every afternoon at four,
lighting up the cracked tile floor,
and your mismatched cups,
and you stood at the stove with flour on your wrist,
mixing banana bread.
I brought you cuttings from my fire escape,
the larkspur, somehow taken hold,
leggy and overeager,
leaning hard against the railing toward what sun it found.
You put them in a jar of tap water
and they dropped their petals within the hour,
small blue-violet coins across your table.
Next time, you said, bring them with the roots.

Summer came on with heat and sweat.
We drove three hours to your family’s land,
a farmhouse sold to strangers twenty years back,
but the woman there let us walk the orchard
where the trees ran wild,
unpruned,
apples hard and sour and small as walnuts.
You showed me where the roses used to be
now a tangle of Virginia creeper
and a thorned vine tugged my sleeve.
Here, you said, crouching down.
Look. They’re still alive.
And there beneath the mess,
a single cane pushing up new leaves,
red-edged and waxy,
We took a cutting.
Wrapped it in wet paper
for the long ride home.

Winter tested us.
You lost your job.
I lost my temper
at things unrelated to you
and entirely about how afraid I grew,
of need,
yours and mine.
We fought about the dishes
and the rent
and whether you’d said you’d call and didn’t
and whether I listened when you spoke
or just waited for my turn.
The rose cutting sat in its pot of soil and did nothing.
No sign of life, no death.
The bare stick of it, a lesson in what endurance requires.
By March you’d found new work.
By March I’d learned to say I’m scared instead of picking fights.
We ate our meals at your small table,
knee pressed warm against knee beneath the wood.
The rose put out a leaf.
Then two.
Then five.

That spring we rented a plot at the community garden,
a rectangle of dirt between a lawyer’s tomatoes
and an elderly couple’s militant rows of lettuce.
We knew nothing about what we attempted.
We planted too close together,
watered too much,
forgot to thin the radishes,
which came up in a furious crowded mass of pink and white.
The zucchini took over and
the carrots forked into strange little hands.
But the roses,
we planted them along the back,
the grandmother’s roses,
now multiplied to four cuttings,
and they grew slow,
stubborn,
entirely ours.
They cared nothing for our impatience.
I began noticing flowers everywhere,
the wild ones, I mean.
The uninvited.
Clover erupting through cracked asphalt.
Chicory along the highway,
sharp blue,
tropical and strange for this gray stretch of warehouse
and off-ramp and chain-link fence.
Dandelions dismantling a parking lot.
I considered what it takes to push through concrete and gravel,
the packed-down earth of places no one planted.

We married in October,
when the light goes slant
and the air bites like green apple.
In the community garden,
between the cabbage
and a stranger’s inexplicable ornamental kale.
Your mother cried.
Our friends brought folding chairs from a borrowed van.
The roses finished for the year,
their hips fat and orange along the canes.
We said the usual words, I do, I will,
but under them my mind returned to the hardware store,
the bench,
the way you laughed
and promised we’d fix things.
Here stood the fix.
Here spread the full sun.

Years blur.
We bought a house with actual land,
a quarter acre of scrub and clay and pine.
The first spring I dug out dozens of rocks
before I could plant a single thing.
You built raised beds from salvaged lumber,
spent whole weekends with a level,
cursing under your breath
We divided the grandmother’s roses.
Planted others.
A pink called Cecile Brunner,
small as a thumbnail.
A yellow Graham Thomas smelling of tea.
Heritage varieties,
old genetics,
plants a stranger’s great-grandmother
might have grown in some other yard,
some other century.
I liked it.
I liked the persistence of the thing.

One summer the tomatoes caught blight
and died.
One summer the deer ate every
single thing.
One summer you stayed
sick for months,
and I learned to do the
weeding alone at dusk
while the bats emerged
and the yard went dark around me
and I bargained with whatever might be listening.
You got better.
We planted a hedge of lilacs along the drive
and the spring they finally flowered,
we cut so many bunches for the house
we couldn’t smell anything else for weeks.
You said the whole place turned purple,
which seemed exactly right.

There are days I stand in the garden
and I think
this is where the flowers live,
this is the place,
and yes I mean the roses
and the peonies,
the ridiculous profusion of the lilacs,
and the weeds, too,
the clover
and the dandelions
and the things I can’t identify,
growing despite my preferences,
my careful plans.
But I also mean
here, in this household,
in the hours we’ve accumulated,
in the way you still laugh
when I kill houseplants,
in the way we’ve grown together.
I cut a larkspur, roots included,
and carry it inside to you.

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Thanks for reading!

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