I watch your garden for you.

The birds and the flowers and

the petals with lonesome

dignity all wait, all watch,

and wonder when you’ll return.

I wonder, too, as I water the

freesias and the roses running

red as the cardinals all chirp

your long forgotten song.

Days are turning into weeks and

years pass by in your absence.

I watch your garden every day,

a hawk keeping watch atop a

perch of blooming daisies

that slowly fade to a storm’s grey.

Your flowers are thriving,

as I ought to tell you, oh,

am I heard? Are you there?

My letters are all returned with

no reply, no smiles, only regret.

Your name remains carved into

a stone, mounted by the rosemary,

and I don’t ever touch it.

Neglect dusts over it, unmarred by

fingerprints or footsteps of a

missing, missed lover.

A thousand years trickle by

as I stare at your dying garden

that I can’t seem to save

for I am a novice to your world’s design

and can’t maintain what I don’t

understand, don’t love, don’t have.

I weep in your lonely garden

for I cannot prevent it from wilting away.

I watch over your garden

but you are long, long gone,

wilted away with a dead daisy’s petals.

There is a boy who comes

and claims to know your name.

He asks when you’ll be back.

all I can tell him,

of course,

is that you already are.

Because you are the petals,

and you are the wind,

and you are the beauty etched into

forever. It’s never enough but

oh, you were enough and

the boy understands.

And as he leaves your doorstep,

he cries and the sky cries with him.

I watch over your garden each

and every day that drifts on by.

The boy joins me,

and we are no longer alone.

We plant new flowers

in the spaces you never finished.

Your garden is your gravestone,

and it is a lovely, wretched thing,

the last that you left behind.