March 13, 2023
Audio
Bad Gardener
By Bethan Tyler
View full text below.
Bad Gardener
By Bethan Tyler
The rain tells me it comes by mistake,
it cannot heed my wanting.
Will you be here tomorrow?
No, I was mistaken.
I’ll come back
yesterday.
I’d asked after it a dozen summers, blamed it for my failed vegetable gardens,
my slug-torn cucumbers and sad spinach, but no.
Today it makes its mistake all over the lawn,
dissolves blossoms as though they were without substance, just air in pink
dresses and ballet shoes.
I know it means no damage, means nothing at all,
and for this I want to embrace it,
want to hold its welling and pooling, its sliding and drooling, its
constant thrum on the greenhouse like a timpani or a tired dancer.
Still, I blame it for my own unhappy accidents,
the diversions and distractions that turned the tomatoes sour and the
cucumbers to flutes, all holes for the wind to whistle through.
I love, I hate, the same thing spins on a wobbly axis
and my imprecision calls it by new names.
The rain keeps making mistakes and so do I. But I
don’t get the grace of no tomorrow,
I will wake up to the sound of someone repotting my raspberries, the guilt
will crush me, I’ll be flat on my back
like a blossom slurried by rain.
I say like, but it’s a different thing entirely.
Bethan Tyler
Bethan Tyler (she/her) is a disabled poet, a former radio DJ, and the proud kin of a cat named Suzie (after Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne"). Her poems have been published in Redivider, Frontier Poetry, The Scores, and Moss, among other journals.
Follow her on Twitter @bybethan
Image description: A close-up photo of the poet, Bethan Tyler, looking directly into the camera. She is a white woman with light brown curly hair and she is wearing a black shirt, silver necklace, and tortoiseshell glasses.