Karen Holmberg

Weeding My Mother’s Garden

I grasp the wooden handle, worn
to the dove-gray clasp of an oar,
to part the switchgrass, discovering
her lace-leaved peonies tipped
with wizened buds, and the green straps
of daylily. Uncover violets,
white with fine blue veins, who gazed up
doll-eyed from my childhood’s
fieldstone steps. When I plunge
the trowel into the earth, I disturb
slim fingers of sleeping tubers.
I set aside wild iris
she transplanted from the shore,
and bulbs no larger than a tear,
blue-tinged white, likely snowdrops.
In the heart, Sweet William, too starved
of light to bloom, has been waiting
for these hands to clear the ground
of hayfern and horsetail,
curlydock and orchardgrass.
A garden is a power
of memory, able to outlast
its maker if you tend it,
if you keep space open
around the roots, or replant them
where you think they will grow.
If you transplant the memory
home. The swollen pearls
of her snowdrops will return her to me
year on year. I am ready to begin.
I draw on her elbow-length gloves
like skin, my hands
at last inside her hands again.