So much goes on in the country of my backyard that I need a throne to oversee it all. Of course the dogs spill out through the back door into their favorite room. They squat and sniff, chase toads, watch the neighbor’s border collie spring up to try to see them over the fence. Birds inhabit the air and the trees, call dibs on the feeder, flee when the mourning doves or the starlings come bumbling in like those old chubby planes barely making the runway. Hummingbirds ignore us all, distant as ballerinas. The lilies I inherited from the previous owner swell, about to open gaudy orange umbrellas that will split and bend backwards like curious octopi. Coreopsis presents buttons of green buds in preparation for a festival of yellow. I should be planting new flowers for the dogs to trample but I have no energy for extra heartbreak, this month last year the month of my sister’s diagnosis and her gone before winter solstice. But I shouldn’t forget the compost pile, all the vegetable detritus and tea bags and egg cartons mixing into a rank stew, the miracle of carbon breaking down so in a few months I can remove the lower panel and shovel out something better, richer, the result of neglect and transformation in the dark. Oh, believe me, I know, the shadows of leaves sway and flutter over the grass, a hundred hands waving, and every time I breathe, I am waving back.
Katherine Riegel is the author of Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag 2019), the chapbook, Letters to Colin Firth, and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Offing, Orion, Poets.org, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and poetry editor for Sweet Lit. Find her at katherineriegel.com.
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