Nursery

Hannah Carrese

Here in the garden
not that garden this garden
where the pine greens
in the sun where the black
squirrel is running bow-
legged so her udders show
where the world is sunning
itself between columns
of pines and palms and
the knots on that cypress
remember their beginnings
well enough to sprout life—
here in this garden
the only knowledge of
things fallen is in the
fluttered leaves and the
shade growing on the
greened pine and
the walking past of this
atom of Adam’s rib,
her hair pink and her
converse dusty—

that is to say there is
in this garden every reason
to think that this garden
is also that garden
clothed in different fig leaves
washed with a sadder sun.

Hannah Carrese is from Colorado, where the prairie meets the Rocky Mountains. She now lives in Oxford, where she studies political theory and also the wolds and streams of England’s green and pleasant land.