There’s a Kusama sculpture exhibit. Gigantic blooming cartoons born of urethane and aluminum rising amongst the lilies, asters, wild rose, and black-eyed Susan’s. Already the hydrangea has ceded. Only the massive pond lilies hold their own.
In the leaflet, I read of Kusama’s love of nature. Think of Aristotle declaring art as imitation of nature, think of artifice.
In the native plant section, my friend Dominic introduces me to the flora and foliage by name. I follow his eye like a monarch butterfly skimming the goldenrod.
Before the Garden’s conservation vault of seeds and species, I conjure Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle lolling in an undulating sea. The hull holding boxes of labeled insects, flowers, mollusks and there, the prize Galapagos finches. Wings trimmed, beaks up, tailfeathers like folded fans.
My mother traveled to the Galapagos. What did she gather there? Possibly only memories detailed in tidy hand-written diaries I’ll come across one day.
As children, we knocked on doors for Earth Day, recycling drives, to scuttle development. My mother planted trees, saved a woody ravine from the bulldozer.
I bulldoze my way through the Botanical Garden, collecting photos and the surreptitious touch of leaf belly and petal. I surrender to goldfinch hovering over echinacea thistles, to the waltz of white satin moths, to the dew-bent leaves of grass, surrender to the dew, evidence nature weeps while we sleep.
Beneath an old growth forest canopy, the sky collapses into pinholes of light, imitating night.
Mark Doty, describing Eden in a poem, writes that there was no time
then but a single day.
I long to stretch the body of this day in a hammock but the Garden is closing, returning me to the Bronx hustling its edges like a hedge trimmer.
This poem first appeared in On the Seawall.
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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. Her third book of poetry, Tic Tic Tic, is forthcoming in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. Heidi’s aurhored of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com
