Weeds

My emerald legions, how tall you have grown:
so many. With what supernatural speed

you overlord the weakest in the garden—
frizzled hydrangeas, sere mint, sun-starved basil.

Tousle-headed, you can see the sky
above the cowering, defeated plots.

This is your day of triumph: Eager sugars
rise up through your ramifying stalks.

And I allowed it. My cool inattention
found good reasons to look the other way,

since all that grows is good, or so I thought.
How soon would height recall high thoughts, and yet,

if I uproot you now, how I would miss you.
Sweet knotgrass, heartsick briar, purple thistle.

Even tilled up, the garden wouldn’t be
as it was when I played here years ago

and my grandmother warned me, since I’d gotten
lanky, not to grow too fast. She lived

to be a hundred, early years wiped clean
from her memory, all except for this:

a vague lightness, as though a sense of wings
lifted her above the loamy ground,

and all she thought of, as the wind upheld her,
was of falling, how tenuous her flight.

Or so I imagine. Though half her age,
I, too, can’t quite remember what it was like

to feel light-footed, open to the sun,
without the clogging stems elbowing out

what I had meant when I first planted here:
larkspur, geraniums, cilantro, lime.

--David Yezzi (1966- ), American poet, editor, librettist, and teacher