Rewilding the Yard
i.
Letting the grass have sex was the first step,
Stems grown feathery with seed heads
Pollinated by the winds.
ii.
Then the first trillium and wild strawberries
Breaking the grip of the monopoly.
iii.
The feathering of winds across naked skin.
iv.
Online I order packets of milkweed seeds,
Wildflower mixtures with meadows pictured
On them, fields of floating colors
Like Klimt blanketed his figures with—lovers
And the women he made love to again
By painting them. Passionflower
And forget-me-not. Perennials to broadcast
With a cup of sand, it says, after the last frost.
v.
In the absence of the mower:
Nothing’s own doing,
The yard now home to buttercups and bluets,
The sweet ranks of the clover.
vi.
Mid-June and that doe grazing in grasses
High enough to hide her suckling fawn,
Days old and new to everything, including
Those wobbly stalks it’s balancing on,
The doe high-stepping carefully around it.
vii.
Lady’s thumb and common morning glory.
viii.
Last fall I picked them up where they’d fallen,
The thick green decaying husks of walnuts,
And tossed them onto a lawn now gone to seed,
Thinking if the squirrels don’t eat them first
I could one day be listening to the sound of rain
The winds made in their leaves.
ix.
August, the anise scent of goldenrod
And haze burning off the meadow.
My days spent attentive to neglect.
Robert Gibb is the author of Sightlines (Poetry Press, 2021), his thirteenth full-length poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Prize Americana for Poetry. Read more.