Friday Poem: "Eden Reconsidered"

My friends Melissa and Jay have a framed cross-stitch—I assume a wedding gift—hanging in their house that reads:

"Same old slippers
Same old rice
Same old glimpse
Of Paradise"

I've never asked them who made it, but its homespun kitschiness (lines from an otherwise-forgotten poet named James Lampton) always manages to hit something true in me: Adam and Eve as the prototypical married couple, whom every married couple flashes upon among the bouquets and foliage of their wedding bower. Some myths endure.

This poem is about the second house Rebecca and I owned together, early in our own marriage. The garden out front along Phoenix Road rapidly grew out of control as we turned our attention to raising our young family. It got so we couldn't get from the driveway to the front door. Desperate measures were called for. Glimpse of paradise, indeed.

Eden Reconsidered

The white hydrangea hangs its rain-heavy heads,
lolling across the narrow walk to our front door.
This morning, my wife, Herculean, slashes it back:
from within, a parasitic Morning Glory
unwinds its tendrils, fingers gently
tickling the dark for a light switch.

Like everything prying the crevices 
between our flagstones, pulling down our
mossy pickets, sliding up the side of the house itself
like kelp-heavy waves splashed on a seawall,
the vine is the same bright shade of green
as the garden it is strangling.

From time to time she looks down
at the tool in her hand, the three-pronged rake,
the clipper, the weedeater, the pause in her eyes
weary, oxygenated, defoliant:
the splinters like shrapnel, the red clay clotting roots,
the new leaves trodden limp and unnameable in her wake.  

This poem originally appeared in Softblow.