Imaginary Garden

Poetry by Gene Twaronite

imaginary gardens with real toads in them

—Marianne Moore, Poetry

As you enter, you see only 

disorder and confusion, 

devoid of any unity or meaning, but look 

closer and you discover the faint

outline of a theme previously hidden in 

the undergrowth, though not one

sign giving a plant’s name as if that 

could tell you what life is all about

for a petunia or boojum in this 

garden of beauty and grotesquerie

where orchid thoughts grow side by side with

corpse flowers and creeping devil cacti,

and the withered gray stems and stalks 

of the departed still rustle 

in the wind. 

Here a fern can fiddle,

free to unfurl into a frond or find

a wholly different shape to life,

the sweet tart taste of an apple 

or the soft leathery touch of a sequoia 

can be sustenance enough,

the wake-robin’s rotten flesh smell

can teach you to extend your antennae

and know the world like a fly,

and the sight of a lone white violet blooming against 

a green mossy cushion in a dark wood can suddenly

make you feel as if walking on sacred ground.

If you sit quietly beside a small breeding pool

as birches, maples, and willows leaf out in spring,

you might just glimpse a line of tiny 

imaginary toads emerging, 

waiting for someone to enter and conceive them

so they can become real.